I have been regaled with excellent prose for the last few days: Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for a mystic, Romantic voice, and now Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night, for something completely different.

“Isn’t the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?”

“Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it’s dead right, there’s no excitement like it. It’s marvellous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day—for a bit, anyhow.”

“…. You expend the trouble and you don’t make any mistake—and then you experience the ecstasy. But if there’s any subject in which you’re content with the second-rate, then it isn’t really your subject.”

“You’re dead right,” said Harriet, after a pause. “If one’s genuinely interested one knows how to be patient, and let time pass, as Queen Elizabeth said. Perhaps that’s the meaning of the phrase about genius being eternal patience…. If you truly want a thing, you don’t snatch; if you snatch, you don’t really want it. Do you suppose that, if you find yourself taking pains about a thing, it’s a proof of its importance to you?”

“…. One always makes surface errors, of course. But a fundamental error is a sure sign of not caring….”

~

“… there are a few rare people, I believe, who don’t look on themselves as jobs but as fellow-creatures.”

“.... The worst of being a job… is the devastating effect is has on one’s character. I’m very sorry for the person who is somebody else’s job; he (or she, of course) ends by devouring or being devoured, either of which is bad for one….”

“But you say you don’t despise those who make some other person their job?”

“Far from despising them,” said Miss de Vine, “I think they are dangerous.”

                       Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night