1. ”A continual atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven't got any of your own.”
2. “(…) And I could kiss you for it. You need not shrink and tremble. I am not going to do it. When I kiss you, it will be an important event - one of those things which stand out among their surroundings like the first time you tasted li-chee. It will not be an unimportant event attached to a detective investigation.”
3. “As any student of literature must, she knew all the sins of the world by name, but it was doubtful whether she recognized them when she met them in real life.”
4. “Bless you, may your shadow never grow bulkier!”
5. ”Books . . . are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.”
6. “But you can’t keep your feelings out of the case. It’s no use saying vaguely that sex is at the bottom of all these phenomena - that’s about as helpful as saying that human nature is at the bottom of them. Sex isn’t a separate thing functioning away all by itself.”
7. “(…) “Do you find easy to get drunk on words?” / “So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.”
8. “(…) “Harriet, I have nothing much in the way of religion, or even morality, but I do recognize a code of behavior of sorts. I do know that the worst sin - perhaps the only sin - passion can commit is to be joyless. It must lie down with laughter or make its bed in hell - there is no middle way…”
9. “Heaven, deliver us, what’s a poet? Something that can’t go to be without making a song about it.”
10. “He looked up and she was instantly scarlet, as though as she had been dipped in boiling water. Through the confusion of her darkened eyes and drumming ears some enormous bulk seemed to stop over her. Then the mist cleared. His eyes riveted upon the manuscript again, but he breathed as though he had been running./ So, thought Harriet, it happened. But it happened long ago. The only new thing that has happened is that now I have got to admit it to myself. I have known it for some time. But does he know it? He has very little excuse after this, for not knowing it. Apparently, he refuses to see it, and that may be new.”
11. “I admit it is better fun to punt than to be punted, and that desire to have all the fun is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry.”
12. “I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.”
13. “If you want to do without personal relationships, then do without them. Don’t stampede yourself into them by imagining that you’ve got to have them or qualify for a Freudian casebook.”
14. “I hate violence! I loathe wars and slaughter, and men quarreling and fighting like beasts! Don’t say it isn’t my business. It’s everybody’s business.”
15. “”I love you.” / “Bravely said - though I had to screw it out of you like a cork out of a bottle. Why should that phrase be so difficult? I - personal pronoun, subjtive case; L-O-V-E, love, verb active, meaning - Well, on Mr. Squeer’s principle, go to bed and work it out.””
16. “I’m quite sure one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest.”
17. “I’m only trying to tell you, in the nicest possible manner, that provided that I were with you, I shouldn’t greatly mind being deaf, dumb, halt, blind and imbecile, afflicted with shingles and whooping-cough, in an open boat without clothes or food, with a thunderstorm coming on. But you’re being painfully stupid about it.”
18. "In detective stories, virtue is always triumphant. They're the purest literature we have."
19. “In the meanwhile, she had got her mood on to paper - and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblestm seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.”
20. “I should like to write you the kind of words that burn the paper they are written on - but words like that have a way of being not only unforgettable and unforgivable. You will burn the paper in any case; and I would rather there should be nothing in it that you cannot forget if you want to.”
21. “It is said that love and a cough cannot be hid.”
22. “It’s getting uncommonly easy to kill people in large numbers, and the first thing a principle does - if it is really a principle - is to kill somebody.”
23. "Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse."
24. “Like all male creatures, Wimsey was a simple soul at bottom.”
25. “Miss Murchinson was reminded of a little set of rules which Lord Peter Wimsey - half in jest and half in earnest - had once prepared for the guidance of “The Cattery.” Of Rule Seven, in particular, which ran: “Always distrust a man who looks you straight in the eyes. He wants to prevent you from seeing something. Look for it.””
26. "Murder for the fun of it breaks all the rules of detective fiction."
27. “Perhaps that’s the meaning of the phrase about genius being eternal patience, which I always thought rather absurd. If you truly want a thing, you don’t snatch; if you snatch you don’t really want it.”
28. “Peter’s hands, holding the keys of hell and heaven… that was the novelist’s habit, of thinking of everything in terms of literary allusions.”
29. ”She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.”
30. “She had met Peter at a moment when every physical feeling had been battered out of her by the brutality of circumstance; by this accident she had been aware of him from the beginning as a mind and spirit localized in a body. Never - not even in those dizzying moments on the river - had she considered him primarily as a male animal, or calculated the promise implicit in the veiled eyes, the long, flexible mouth, the curiously vital hands. Nor, since of her he always asked and never demanded, had she felt in him any domination but that of intellect. But now, as he advanced towards her along the flower-bordered path, she saw him with new eyes - the eyes of women who had seen him before they knew him - saw him, as they saw him, dynamically. Miss Hillyard, Miss Edwards, Miss de Vine, the Dean even, each in her own way had recognized the same thing: six centuries of possessiveness, fastened under the yoke of urbanity.”
31. “She resented the way in which he walked in and out of her mind as if it was his own flat.”
32. “She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, corteous, wealthy, well-read, amusing and enamored, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of utter inferiority which leads to prostration and hero-worship. But she now realized that there was, after all, something god-like about him. He could control a horse.”
33. “The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people seem to think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity and the sudden acquisition of wealth.”
34. ”The biologist can push it back to the original protist, and the chemist can push it back to the crystal, but none of them touch the real question of why or how the thing began at all. The astronomer goes back untold million of years and ends in gas and emptiness, and then the mathematician sweeps the whole cosmos into unreality and leaves one with mind as the only thing of which we have any immediate apprehension. Cogito ergo sum, ergo omnia esse videntur. All this bother, and we are no further than Descartes. Have you noticed that the astronomers and mathematicians are much the most cheerful people of the lot? I suppose that perpetually contemplating things on so vast a scale makes them feel either that it doesn't matter a hoot anyway, or that anything so large and elaborate must have some sense in it somewhere.”
35. “The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are not the kind that any fool can run up in half an hour with a machine.”
36. “There are incidents in one’s life which, through some haphazard coincidence of time and mood, acquire a symbolic value.”
37. ”Those who make some other person their job . . . are dangerous.”
38. “The worst sin - perhaps the only sin - passion can commit, is to be joyless.”
39. “”This won’t do,” said Harriet. “This really will not do. My sub-conscious has a most treacherous imagination.” She groped for the switch of her bedside lamp. “It is disquieting to reflect that one’s dreams never symbolize one’s real wishes, but always something Much Worse.” She turned the light on and sat up. / “If I really wanted to be passionately embraced by Peter, I should dream of something like dentists or gardening. I wonder what are the unthinkable depths of awfulness that can only be expressed by the polite symbol of Peter’s embraces. Damn Peter! I wonder what he would do about a case like this.””
40. "Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force."
41. "Trouble shared is trouble halved."
42. “Very dangerous things, theories.”
43. “Well - if one leaves letters unanswered long enough, some of them answer themselves.”
44. “Well, let’s have a look at the obvious. The biggest crime of these blasted psychologists is to have obscured the obvious.”
45. “What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?”
46. “What’s the good of making mistakes if you don’t use them?”
47. “When the empire comes in at the door, logic goes out at the window.”
48. “”Who was Barbara?” asked Harriet quickly. / “Oh, a girl. I owe her quite a lot, really,” replied Winsey, musingly. “When she married the other fellow, I took up sleuthing as a cure for wounded feelings, and it’s really been great fun, take it all in all. Dear me, yes - I was very much bowled over that time. I even took a special course in logic for her sake.” / “Good gracious!” / “For the pleasure of repeating ‘Barbara celarent darii ferio baralipton.’ There was a kind of mysterious romantic lilt about the thing which was somehow expressive of passion. Many a moonlight have I murmured it to the nightingales which haunt the gardens of St. John’s (…).”
49. “Yes. Best intentions no security. They never are, of course. You may say you won’t interfere with another person’s soul, but you do - merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficult, so to speak, of not existing.”
50. “You can't carry through any principle without doing violence to somebodey. Either directly or indirectly. Every time you disturb the balance of nature you let in violence. And if you leave nature alone you get violence in any case.”
51. “(…) “You don’t seem to have anything to do with real life. You are going about in a dream.” She stopped speaking, and her angry voice softened. “But it’s a beautiful dream in its way. It seems queer to me now to think that once I was a scholar… I don’t know. You may be right after all. Learning and literature have a way of outlasting the civilization that made them.””
52. “(...) You know, the sort of people bring out and say, ‘I’ve often thought of doing it myself, if I could only find time to sit and write it.’ I gather that sitting down is all that is necessary for producing masterpieces.”
