Love Quote by Dorothy L. Sayers

Sayers pulls off a bracing theological two-step: she drags the reader through the mud, then insists the only way out is to admit you’re covered in it. The line hinges on a paradox Christians have always flirted with and modern readers often resist: grace doesn’t land as “good news” until you’re convinced you need it. “True love of God” isn’t framed as comfort or uplift; it’s a shock of recognition that arrives only after the ego’s defenses crack.

The subtext is partly pastoral, partly impatient. Sayers is diagnosing why religious language so often bounces off people who consider themselves basically decent. If you believe your moral failures are minor administrative errors, God becomes a self-improvement app. Her choice of “wicked” is deliberately unfashionable: not “flawed,” not “imperfect,” but morally implicated. It’s meant to collapse the modern habit of treating sin as a personality quirk rather than a rupture in relationship.

Then comes the kicker: “you can’t teach people that.” That’s Sayers the novelist speaking, wary of tidy moral instruction. She distrusts secondhand repentance, the kind you can perform after reading the right pamphlet. Experience here isn’t romanticized suffering; it’s the hard, humiliating education of consequences, self-deception, and the limits of willpower. In the mid-century context Sayers lived through - a culture bruised by war and moral grandstanding - the warning lands with bite: doctrines can be argued, but self-knowledge is usually learned the expensive way.