Notable Quotables from Dorothy Sayers

I am reading The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L. Sayers’ Encounter with Dante By Barbara Reynolds, and I came across this awesome quote:

You are, of course, perfectly right — I never do anything (I mean , I never write anything) that I don’t like writing, or about anything or anyone I don’t like.”

Wow. Those are words to live by for sure. I have read a lot of Ms. Sayers’ works, including a fascinating book called “The Mind of the Maker,” where she introduces some interesting ponderables, like this:

The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.

And this excerpt:

For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.

First, [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration] there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father.

Second, there is the Creative Energy [or Activity] begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.

Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.

If you step back and ponder that, it makes a lot of sense.

*****

For those of you who don’t know, Dorothy Sayers was an absolutely amazing woman with quite the career.

She graduated from Oxford in 1915, wrote detective novels, worked as an advertising copywriter (see the Guinness ad), wrote plays and essays, and, as mentioned above, she took on the translation of Dante’s works.