As My Whimsy Takes Me

Peter on money: "If you've been brought up to havin' it it's a bit awkward to drop it suddenly. Like baths, you know."
-Clouds of Witness

Peter: "Truth in advertising is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas , with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentations into a form that the public can swallow."
-Murder Must Advertise

Peter on employing spinsters: "People want questions asked. Whom do they send? A man with large flat feet and a notebook - a man whose private life is conducted in a series of inarticulate grunts. I send a lady with a long, woolly jumper on knitting-needles and jangly things round her neck. Of course she askes questions - everyone expects it. Nobody is suprised. Nobody is alarmed. And so called superfluity is agreeably and usefully disposed of. One of these days you'll put up a statue to me, with an inscription:

TO THE MAN WHO MADE THOUSANDS OF SUPERFLOUS WOMEN

HAPPY

WITHOUT INJURY TO THEIR MODESTY

OR EXERTION TO HIMSELF

-Unnatural Death

Peter: "How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks."
- Gaudy Night

Harriet to herself:"With tobacco and literature one could face out any situation, provided, of course, that the book was not written in an unknown tongue."
- Gaudy Night

Harriet: "Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?"
Peter:"So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober. Which accounts for my talking so much."
-Gaudy Night

Peter: "Would you have your youth back if you could, Harriet?"
Harriet: "Not for the world."
Peter: "Nor I. Not for anything you could give me. Perhaps that's an exageration. For one thing you could give me I would want twenty years of my life back. But not the same twenty years. And if I went back to my twenties, I shouldn't be wanting the same thing."
-Gaudy Night

Peter: "What's the good of making mistakes if you don't use them?"
-Gaudy Night

Dorothy Sayers about Harriet: "She went to bed thinking more about another person than about herself. This goes to prove that even minor poetry may have its practical uses."
-Gaudy Night

Peter: "I avoid serious thought like the plague."
-Gaudy Night

Peter: "I do know that the worst sin - perhaps the only sin - that passion can commit, is to be joyless."
-Gaudy Night