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"I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn't a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there'd have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before the crime and a beautiful set of marks which could only have come there between two and three in the morning, but this being real life in a London November, you might as well expect footprints in Niagara. I searched the roofs right along-and came to the jolly conclusion that any person in any blessed flat in the blessed row might have done it."
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"A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done."

". . . nobody in particular is to blame, that I can see, for the state in which things are . . ."

"I'm against solutions that are worse than the problem. Like old women who want their hair dyed the color of shoe polish to hide the gray."

"Expectations are at war, if good feeling and discomfort clash. When we are expecting zest and joy, our good karma may be ousted by distress and frustration, if negative downbeat waves are emitted. Just with a feel of realism, without prejudice, should we step into the future. What will be, will be. Only the fortune of war will tell, since life may be war or peace. ['Fish for silence.']"

"Sometimes it is not right to wait for the right train. Take any train instead of rotting at the station! In other words, be realistic!"

"In India everything has a use and a value."

"There is not much to be got anywhere in the world. It is filled with misery and pain; if a man escapes these, boredeom lies in wait for him at every corner. Nay more; it is evil which generally has the upper hand, and folly that makes the most noise. Fate is cruel and mankind pitiable."

"Christianity does NOT replace the technical. When he tells you to feed the hungry and doesn't give you lessons in cookery. If you want to learn THAT, you must go to a cook rather than a Christian."
Explore more quotes by Dorothy L. Sayers

"She reflected she must be completely besotted with Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra."

"You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him," said Miss Hillyard. "It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about -- but in the end it left him worse of."But that," said Peter, "was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out."

"Nothing goes so well with a hot fire and buttered crumpets as a wet day without and a good dose of comfortable horrors within. The heavier the lashing of the rain and the ghastlier the details, the better the flavour seems to be."

"The more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is -- at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold."

"Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them."

"Don't be so damned discouraging," said Wimsey. "I have already carefully explained to you that this time I am investigating this business. Anybody would think you had no confidence in me.""People have been wrongly condemned before now.""Exactly; simply because I wasn't there.""I never thought of that."

"The planet's tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come."

"The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity, and the stronger the diversity the more massive the unity."

"I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether."

"Salcombe Hardy groaned: "How long, O Lord, how long shall we have to listen to all this tripe about commercial arsenic? Murderers learn it now at their mother's knee."
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