“One must not misrepresent matters, even in the interests of one’s own dogmatic convictions.”

Sayers, letter to A.C. Capey, April 1954 (vol. 4)

“Yes - it is frightening; and that’s why I must be so careful to get everything properly checked up, and not fall into Error myself. Because the thing really doesn’t seem believable. One doesn’t often meet with Error with a capital E - Spenser’s “monster vile” - only with honest misunderstandings and mild stupidities. And if you tell people that intellectual Error is Sin, they think you are being snooty and absurd, because people ‘can’t help making mistakes, and oughtn’t to be blamed for it.’  Of course, we are all liable to error - that’s just ‘original sin’ and nobody’s fault in particular. But real Error is wicked...And God help us, I think that’s what we’re up against - but I must be sure. Sure of the facts; because it is, as you say, so extremely easy to entertain Error in the form of Righteous Indignation, and Hatred, and Contempt. Only the facts will save us.”

Letter to Barbara Reynolds, Nov., 1940 (Vol. 2)

“Nine years’ advertising experience rubbed it into me that it is wiser never to put a wrong idea into a reader’s mind, even negatively.”

-Letter to Uvedele Lambert, 1953 (Wade Center)

“I will say for the Americans that, although they are very slow to learn from example they are extremely quick to learn from experience. That is why they are usually very bad soldiers at the beginning of a campaign and very good ones at the end of it, when they have learned to keep their heads down (a thing they will never suffer other people to tell them!)”

- Letter to Doris McCarthy, 12 April 1948 (Vol.3)

“Nobody knows what America thinks, not even Americans.”

-Letter to Barbara Reynolds, 21 Feb. 1950 (Vol. 3)

“Perhaps the first thing (we) can learn form the artist is the only way of mastering one’s material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery, and to cooperate with it in love…”

-Mind of the Maker, p. 186.

“Teachers further complain that they have to spend a great deal of time in teaching University students what to ask. This indicates that the young mind experiences great difficulty in entangling the essence of a subject from its accidents.”

-Preface to The Mind of the Maker

“…a cousin of my own once demanded, ‘Mother, where has yesterday gone to?’ My aunt courageously undertook to find out; but by the time she returned, primed with the opinion of an eminent Oxford philosopher, the inquirer had lost interest and, like jesting Pilate, would not stay for an answer.”

-The Mind of the Maker, Ch. VII

“I’m glad to know that you like St. Augustine. I first read the Confessions when I was about twenty-three, and found it so exciting I couldn’t put it down. Between Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and Dante’s Divine Comedy, with whichI fell in love when I was nearly fifty, I don’t think I encountered anything of its kind so enthralling.”

-Letter to Joan Nolan, 12 Oct. 1949 (Vol. 3)

“It is quite true they [British citizens during WWII] ought not to be idle and bored, but the fact remains that they are, simply because they are the produce of a standardised civilization which does their thinking and feeling for them, and because it is a very long and difficult job for them to learn, at this late hour of the day, to think for themselves.” -Letter to Sir Richard Acland, 17 April 1940 (Vol. 2)

While dim through the roofs of water I shall hear, and hardly hear/How the birds of Bran the Blessed sing Aves all the year./The waves of God will go over me, the waves and the great green flood,/Where the ash-buds break to blossom in a red gleam like blood.

-”Lignum Vitae” in Catholic Tales and Christian Songs

“I think in some ways G.K.’s books have become more a part of my mental makeup than those of any writer you could name.” -Letter to Mrs. G.K. Chesterton upon his death, 15 June, 1936 (Vol. 1)

“I should like to say, on my own behalf, how important I feel your husband’s work to have been in showing us how to dignify a kind of literature [detective stories] which had fallen on very bad ways by restoring to it that touch with the greater realities which it had almost entirely lost.”

-Letter to Mrs. G.K. Chesterton upon his death, 15 June, 1936 (Vol. 1)

“Like a beneficent bomb, he blew out of the church a quantity of stained glass of a very poor period, and let in gusts of fresh air…”

-Preface to Chesterton’s play, The Surprise

“I must personally eliminate all situations which would confine either mind or body in steel or whalebone.”

-”If You Had to Live in a Play or Novel,” Strand Magazine, Dec. 1935

“Let us take this terrible business - so distressing to the minds of bishops - of the women who go about in trousers. We are asked: ‘Why do you want to go about in trousers? They are extremely unbecoming to most of you. You only do it to copy the men.’ To this we may very properly reply: ‘It is true that they are unbecoming. Even on men they are remarkably unattractive. But, as you men have discovered for yourselves, they are comfortable, they do not get in the way of one’s activities like skirts and they protect the wearer from draughts about the ankles. As a human being, I like comfort and dislike draughts. If the trousers do not attract you, so much the worse; for the moment I do not want to attract you. I want to enjoy myself as a human being, and why not? As for copying you, certainly you thought of trousers first and to that extent we must copy you. But we are not such abandoned copy-cats as to attach these useful garments to our bodies with braces. There we draw the line. These machines of leather and elastic are unnecessary and unsuited to the female form.”

-”Are Women Human?” 1938

What is this bitter sin of thine,/So little to have understood,…/To find me in the bread and wine/And find me not in flesh and blood?

-”Sacrament” in Catholic Tales and Christian Songs

“The cat or dog does not become less generally amiable through the daily killing of rats and mice, but the cruel man degenerates in all his human attributes…”

-Begin Here, Ch. V

“Now, to anyone who reads the Poetics with an unbiased mind, it is evident that Aristotle was not so much a student of his own literature as a prophet of the future. He criticised [sic] the contemporary Greek theatre because it was, at that time, the most readily available, widespread and democratic form of popular entertainment presented for his attention. But what, in his heart of hearts, he desired was a good detective story; and it was not his fault, poor man, that he lived some twenty centuries too early to revel in the Peripeties of Trent’s Last Case or the Discoveries of The Hound of the Baskervilles. ”

-“Aristotle on Detective Fiction.” Lecture delivered at Oxford, 1935.

“Ha, ha! Now you really have got a language to deal with! No pale, correct, pure-blooded aristocrat, but a great gorging, guzzling, base-begot trollop of a language, that will assimilate anything, go to bed with anybody, and can’t tell you which of ten drunken sailors is her father.”

-Letter to Barbara Reynolds, 5 Sept., 1956 (Vol. 4)

“Nowadays, all the publishing houses print ‘medieval’ (unless one firmly instructs them not to) for no reason that I can see - unless it is that having replaced the ‘e’ in ‘judgement’ they think they must make a corresponding economy somewhere.”

-Letter to Lewis Thorpe, 7 Oct., 1957 (Vol.4)

“Of such are the dreary little men who write to the papers protesting - in the teeth of Chaucer, Bacon, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, the English Bible, Milton, Burton, Congreve, Swift, Burke, Peacock, Ruskin, Arnold and the whole tradition of English letters - that a sentence must not end with a preposition. This is no matter of syntax; it is a matter of idiom; and the freedom to handle our prepositions is among the most glorious in our charter of liberties. “

-”The English Language,” Unpopular Opinions

“If we make ourselves greedy and grasping tyrants of the earth - ravishing and not serving it - it takes its revenge in waste lands, barren soil, flood, drought, and dearth. Every time we upset the balance of natural forces by over-cultivation, either of earth, animals, or what-not, we seem to come up against some law which sends back to us in famine or disease the catastrophes we tried to avoid….We have got it in our heads that, as a speaker remarked to me the other day at a W.E.A. meeting, ‘the earth is for us to use’, but I think we shall be making a great mistake if we interpret this a meaning that it is there for us to exploit without reverence and without caution. That is to make nature, our fellow-creature, into our slave - and not much better, perhaps, than making slaves of our fellow-men.”

-Letter to Flight-Lieutenant Bryan W. Monahan, Jan. 15, 1943. Vol. 2

“We [the Church] have been pretending for seventy years that we really shouldn’t have to face the disconcerting speed-up in our ability to turn out synthetic and mass-produced unnecessaries.”

-Letter to Maurice Reckitt, October 31, 1945, Vol. 3.

“Meanwhile, the invasion of the skies by nasty little bits of ironmongery seems to have begun. I sometimes think that if all the manufacturers of projectiles would project themselves to the other side of the moon and stay there, life would be easier for everybody. A new row of revolting street lamps is not going up on the other side of my house. It looks as though I shall never see the stars again!”

-Letter to B. Marsden, Oct. 30, 1957. Vol. 4

“All questions of fact and all judgments calling for specialized experience must be referred to the people who have that special knowledge and experience. But when we have heard what they have to say, we must use our individual judgment as to the action to be taken…We must also remember that an expert in one department is only an amateur in another; a biologist is no more specially qualified to pontificate about theology than a theologian to lay down the law about stage management.” - Begin Here, Chap. VI

“I am afraid opera is one of  the forms of entertainment that I very seldom patronise, so that I cannot be said to have any favourite selection. Anyway, why this craze for other people’s ‘favorites’ - as though great works of music and literature were a kind of pet animal. I am sorry, but I am completely allergic to this kind of bosh!”

- Letter to Stephen Williams, 14 Feb. 1945 (Vol. 3)

“He knew that he had a good eighty miles an hour under his bonnet, and there is no speed-limit in France.m description.”

-”The Bibulous Business of a Matter of Taste,” Lord Peter Views the Body

“…and the French! It did one good to hear such French as that.”

-Letter to her Parents, October 24, 1909 (Vol 1)

“I do love French people….You can’t think how pleasant it is to be smiled and bowed to, and called ‘Mademoiselle,’ and paid compliments, and be told that you are si charmante.”

-Letter her Parents, November 6, 1910 (Vol. 1)

“A period of great confusion followed [after WWI]. The enlightened principle which the British had thoroughly absorbed was that war of any kind was naught. Armaments, as constituting both a cause and a recognition of war, were supremely naughty. On the other hand, it became clear that Japan in China and Italy in Abyssinia were doing naughty things, and that there was a sad outbreak of naughtiness in Spain. The same wise adults who proclaimed that armaments were naughty were also raising an enlightened voice urging Britain to interfere and prevent these wicked goings-on. Socialist Auntie exhorted her to stop bad Benito and atrocious Adolf from pulling the cat’s tail, while Pacifist Mamma took away her stick and told her that ladies didn’t use their fists. Britannia could only scream and scold while Benito cocked snoots at the whole family and natsy rough Adolf proceeded to catch the Jewish cat and skin it alive. Enlightenment then suggested that poor Adolf had a complex, because naughty Britannia had taken away his kittens and added them to her family of Imperial lion-cubs. Perhaps he would feel better and kinder if she presented him with the whole litter. Britannia was stubborn about this, and was universally called a selfish little girl.”

-”They Tried to be Good,” Unpopular Opinions

“I am only concerned to interpret the riddle of the English during the decades of disaster. The answer is, I think, that we wanted to be good and tried to be good, but the sincerest efforts after virtue produce only chaos if they are directed by a ramshackle and incoherent philosophy. We were persuaded that God hated us, and that we ought to go into the garden and eat worms. If a nation is well-meaning and not very clear-headed, it is easily persuaded of these things by people who talk as though they had God in their pocket.”

-”They Tried to be Good,” Unpopular Opinions

“We have no reliable record except of a person who from the start assumed the divine authority to forgive sins in His own name, and put his own commands on a level with the Law delivered from Sinai. This in a Jew could have only one meaning. Consequently, if Jesus was not God, He was either a liar or a lunatic, and very far from a ‘perfect man’. The ‘human Jesus’ so dear to the nineteenth-century liberal mind has not been able to stand modern critical examination.”

-Letter to Irene Amesbury, 1 June 1945 (Vol. 3)

“We need not / Play nursemaid to the Babe of Bethlehem / To shield Him from the harlot and the thief, / Or keep those tender, innocent hands from harm / That bear the sharp nails' imprint, and uphold / The axis of the spheres."

-Zeal of Thy House, said by the Prior (Act III, p. 61)

To C.S. Lewis [concerning a correspondent]

“Meanwhile, I am left with an atheist on my hands. I do not want him. I have no use for him. I have no missionary zeal at all. God is behaving with his usual outrageous lack of scruple. The man keeps on bothering about Miracles; he thinks Hall Caine’s Life of Christ is the last word Biblical Criticism, and objects violently to the doctrine of Sin, the idea of a Perfect Man without any sex-life, and the ecclesiastical tyranny of the B.B.C. He is in the Home Guard, can’t spell, and has a mind like a junk-shop. If he reads any of the books I have recommended, he will write me long and disorderly letters about them. It will go on for years. I cannot bear it. Two of the books are yours - I only hope they will rouse him to fury. Then I shall hand him on to you. You like souls. I don’t. God is simply taking advantage of the fact that I can’t stand intellectual chaos, and it isn’t fair. Anyhow, there aren’t any up-to-date books about Miracles. People have stopped arguing about them. Why? Has Physics sold the pass?: or is it merely that everybody is thinking in terms of Sociology and international Ethics? Please tell me what to do with this relic of the Darwinian age, who is wasting my time, sapping my energies and destroying my soul. Yours indignantly, Dorothy L. Sayers.”

-Letter to Lewis, May 13, 1943 (Vol. 2)

“One trouble about C.S. Lewis, I think, is his fervent missionary zeal. I welcome his able dialectic, and he is a tremendous hammer for heretics. But he is apt to think that one should rush into every fray and strike a blow for Christendom, whether or not one is equipped by training and temperament for that particular conflict.”

-Letter to Br. George Every, 10 July, 1947 (Vol. 3)

“Lewis is magnificently ruthless with the people who do set out to produce what purports to be a logical argument and then fake the premises, or beg the question, or leave their middles undistribtued, or use ambivalent terms, or smuggle the concept of time into an argument about eternity, or ignorantly confuse efficient causes with final causes and attribute the resulting absurdity to St. Thomas. He is down on the thing like a rat; he is God’s terrier, and I wouldn’t be without him for the world.”

-Letter to Br. George Every, 10 July, 1947 (Vol. 3)

“For there are only two good reasons for writing a play (or indeed for writing anything), the first being that one hopes to make money, and the second, that that is the play one wants to write.”

-”Writing a Local Play,” Farmer’s Weekly, 26 Aug., 1938

“Nothing will induce me to pretend there is anything unpleasant about making a success of one’s books, or about making money from them.”

-Letter to M. Mosley, 18 April, 1937 (Vol. 2)

“Capitalist or Communist, I cannot believe that salvation is to be found in any system which subordinates Man to Economics.”

-Letter to Richard Acland, 17 April, 1940 (Vol. 2)

“We should ask of an enterprise, not ‘will it pay?’ but ‘is it good?’; of a man, not ‘what does he make?’ but ‘what is his work worth?’; of goods, not can we induce people to buy them?’ but ‘are they useful things well made?’; of employment, not ‘how much a week?’ but ‘will it exercise my faculties to the utmost?’ And shareholders in - let us say - brewing companies, would astonish the directorate by arising at the shareholders’ meetings and demanding to know, not merely where the profits go or what dividends are to be paid, not even merely whether the workers’ wages are sufficient and the conditions of labor satisfactory, but loudly, and with a proper sense of personal responsibility: ‘What goes into the beer?’”

-”Why Work?” 1942

“In the event of a German occupation of this country, which is possible, though I think not probable, be careful not to advertise your connection with me; writers of my sort will not be popular with the Gestapo.”

-Letter to John, her son, 23 June, 1940 (Vol. 2)

“It is a great part of Hitler’s influence that he sees all his history grossly simplified, like a child’s picture book full of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ figures in bright colors.” -Begin Here, Ch. VI

“…Can the most fruitful discussion of delicate and complicated problems possibly be carried on before the eye of the camera and with lips close to the microphone, posturing to the criticism and the applause of the ignorant on five continents? I do not know - it is one of those things one ought to think over.”

-Begin Here, Ch. VI.

“I never remember the details of any book when I have only read it once, which is why I find a library subscription so unsatisfying.”

-Letter to Charles Williams, 16-17 August, 1944 (Vol.3)

“…recommending at random, I may merely put the young person off some masterpiece for ever, by wishing it on them at an unsuitable moment.

What they need to be taught is how to read, and how to follow up their reading. Not to skim through lists of other people’s choices all anywho, but having found an author or a subject which interests them, to pursue that interest till it opens up the whole connected and articulated structure of literature; as it will do if it is followed for its own sake and not because one says so.” - Letter to John Hadfield, 18 April 1945 (Vol. 3)

“Here, however, are four cardinal rules for the reading of great literature: 1) Find out what the writer is actually saying. 2) Be ready to believe that he means what he says. 3) Read consecutively. 4) Practice humility.”

-Letter to Wilson Midgely, 14 Feb., 1951 (Vol. 3)

“Pockets seem to be one of those obvious things, like upholstery, which our ancestors took a surprisingly long time to invent. You would think that nothing was simpler than to take a nice piece of stuffing, and nail it firmly to a wooden plank and sit on it. But no! Hard chairs, hard benches, hard stools, mitigated by moveable ‘guysshyns’ are the rule till somewhere about the 17th century, when it occurred so [sic] somebody to assemble the two things and drive in a few tacks.”

-Letter to Barbara Reynolds, 5 Jan., 1955 (Vol. 4)

'“[The Church] has driven out the poets and prophets, trampled beauty underfoot, and set her face like a mule against knowledge; she has consecrated stupidity and enthroned sentimentality, which is the stupidity of the heart.”

-”The Fest of St. Verb,” 1940

“….the effect of writing these plays [Man Born to Be King] upon the character of my patient [Sayers] is wholly satisfactory. I have already had the honour to report intellectual and spiritual pride, vainglory, self-opinionated dogmatism, irreverence, blasphemous frivolity, frequentation of the company of theatricals, captiousness, impatience of correction, polemical fury, shortness of temper, neglect of domestic affairs, lack of charity, egotism, nostalgia for secular occupations, and a growing tendency to consider the Bible as Literature.”

Sluckdrib (written by Sayers) to C.S. Lewis, May 13, 1943, Vol. 2.

“The capture of one fifth-rate soul [i.e. Sayers’], (which was already thoroughly worm-eaten and shaky owing to my assiduous attention) scarcely compensates for the fact that numbers of stout young souls in brand-new condition are opening up negotiations with the Enemy and receiving reinforcements of faith. . . .We knew, of course, that the author is as corrupt as rotten cheese; why has no care been taken to see that this corruption… has its proper effect upon the listeners? We ought not to take the Enemy’s word for it that a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit. If he is telling the truth, this stuff ought to poison people. But the fools eat it and it does them good…”

Sluckdrib (written by Sayers) to C.S. Lewis, May 13, 1943, Vol. 2.

“To the dead Master of the Affirmations, Charles Williams.”

-Dedication to Sayers’s translation of Hell and Purgatory , 1949 and 1955

“Charles Williams had that wonderful gift of making everything came alive. Nothin was ever the same, when once he had touched it. . .All periods and places were equally present to him, and equally sacred and significant - not only ancient palaces or simple villages, but even modern suburbs or industrial cities. He as a wonderful person to talk to, because nothing for him was ever insignificant or dull…”

-Letter to John Sinclair, 16 Sept. 1949 (Vol. 3)

“We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.”

― “Are Women Human?”, 1938

“[T]he 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.”

-“Are Women Human?”, 1938

“A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.”

-“Are Women Human?”, 1938

“Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man - there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!"; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious.”

- “Are Women Human?”, 1938

““The thing [children] react to and remember is not logical argument, but mystery and the queer beauty of melodious words….I don’t suppose it would occur to you to put on a reading of the Athanasian Creed as an attraction for the Children’s Hour; yet I know of a small boy of seven who urgently demanded this of his mother as a special birthday treat. It is the language that stirs and excites: ‘Not three incomprehensible but three uncreated; but one uncreated in one incomprehensible.’”

-Letter to Miss Jenkin, Nov. 1940 (Vol. 2)

“The sheer gorgeousness of ‘Jabberwocky’ as a sequence of entrancing sounds was early revealed to me, and indeed, many things that I could only dimly understand were delightful by reason of rhyme and rhythm.”

-My Edwardian Childhood, p. 14

“The only Christian work is good work well done.”

-”Why Work?” Found in Letters to a Diminished Church

“A right kind of work must be related, not only to a right understanding of the needs of man, but also to a willingness to serve and love the material body of God’s universe. We are fond of priding ourselves on our conquest of Nature - but we ought not to treat Nature as the [Nazi] Germans treat a conquered province, by spoiling, ravaging, and destroying for our own greed.”

-”Vocation in Work,” from A Christian Basis for the Post-War World.

"This is, I maintain, the essential heresy at the back of the great economic fallacy that allows wheat and coffee to be burned and fish to be used for manure while whole populations stand in need of food. The fallacy is that work is not the expression of man’s creative energy in the service of society, but only something he does in order to obtain money and leisure. . . .We cannot expect a sacramental attitude to work, while many people are forced, by our evil standard of values, to do work that is a spiritual degradation - a long series of financial trickeries, for example, or the manufacture of vulgar and useless trivialities.”

-”Creed or Chaos”

“[In the war], we have had to learn the bitter lesson that in all the world there are only two sources of real wealth: the fruit of the earth and the labor of men; and to estimate work not by the money it brings to the producer, but by the worth of the thing that is made.”

-”Why Work?”

“We should ask of an enterprise, not ‘will it pay?’ but ‘is it good?’; of a man, not ‘what does he make?’ but ‘what is his work worth?’; of goods, not ‘can we induce people to buy them?’ but ‘are they useful things well made?’ ...Shareholders in–let us say–brewing companies, would astonish the directorate by arising at shareholders’ meetings and demanding to know, not merely where the profits go or what dividends are to be paid, not even merely whether the workers’s wages are sufficient and the conditions of labor satisfactory, but loudly, and with a proper sense of personal responsibility: ‘What goes into the beer?’”

-”Why Work?”

“Words are like drugs of addiction. If the dose is continually repeated, it loses effect, or becomes a mere irritant.”

-“Words I am Weary of” Strand Magazine, May 1943

“The expected word has no power to stimulate: it produces only stupor, if it does not lead to nausea or vulgar jeers.”

-“Words I am Weary of” Strand Magazine, May 1943

“One warning should be written in letters of brass to be seen by every writer who wants to make an appeal, preach a crusade, or convict of sin: You cannot stir the soul with abstract nouns.”

-”Ink of Poppies,” The Spectator, 1937

“We use [language] in varying contexts which modify its significance, as a color shows modified by the colors which surround it.”

-”Poetry, Language, and Ambiguity,” 1954. Found in Volume 3 of the The Dante Papers.