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To start with invention is the mark of the fertile mind ... and leads later to the interpretation of experience to start with the reproduction of experience is the infallible index of a barren invention.

Dorothy L. Sayers

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Dorothy L. Sayers
Age: 64 †
Born: 1893
Born: June 13
Died: 1957
Died: December 17
Copywriter
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Dorothy Sayers
Dorothy Leigh Sayers
Dorothy Leigh Sayers Fleming
Dorothy L Sayers
Dorothy Leigh Fleming
Invention
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Fertile
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More quotes by Dorothy L. Sayers

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Still, it doesn't do to murder people, no matter how offensive they may be.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.
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I know what you're thinking - that anybody with proper sensitive feelings would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feelings should prevent me from doing my proper job.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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The war has jerked us pretty sharply into consciousness about this slug-a-bed sin of Sloth, and perhaps we need not say too much about it. But two warnings are rather necessary.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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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.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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Well-bred English people never have imagination.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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The doctrine of hell is not mediaeval priestcraft for frightening people into giving money to the church: it is Christ's deliberate judgment on sin.... We cannot repudiate hell without altogether repudiating Christ.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or other, been taught. Even if we learned nothing-perhaps in particular if we learned nothing-our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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All the children seem to be coming out quite intelligent, thank goodness. It would have been such a bore to be the mother of morons, and it’s an absolute toss-up, isn’t it? If one could only invent them, like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to a well-regulated mind.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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Placetne, magistra? Placet.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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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.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, ye cannot enter the kingdom of God. One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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Trouble shared is trouble halved.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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Forgiveness is the one unpardonable sin.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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You cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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There is one vast human experience that confronts us so formidably that we cannot pretend to overlook it. There is no solution to death. There is no means whatever whereby you or I, by taking thought, can solve this difficulty in such a manner that it no longer exists.
Dorothy L. Sayers