Life & Wisdom Quote by Dorothy L. Sayers

There’s a cold snap in Sayers’ phrasing: “make some other person their job” turns devotion into employment, with its implied hours, duties, performance reviews. It’s a moral warning dressed up as a matter-of-fact observation. Not “unhealthy,” not “overbearing” - dangerous. The word choice refuses to romanticize the impulse to manage, rescue, fix, or “live for” someone else. In Sayers’ hands, that posture isn’t merely clingy; it’s coercive.

The intent is to puncture a sentimental ideal that was especially marketable in her era: the virtuous self-sacrificing woman, the spouse-as-project, the family member whose identity is a full-time caretaking role. Sayers, who moved through early 20th-century British culture as both a crime writer and a sharp Anglican thinker, had little patience for pieties that mask power. When another person becomes your “job,” you gain a rationale for intrusion. You can justify surveillance as concern, control as responsibility, guilt as love.

The subtext is also a critique of dependency as a two-person system: the “employee” needs tasks to feel necessary; the “client” gets smothered or infantilized, then blamed for not improving on schedule. It’s the emotional logic of the fixer, the martyr, the benevolent tyrant. Sayers knows how easily care slides into ownership, how “I’m just trying to help” can become a permission slip for manipulation.

What makes the line work is its brisk professionalism. By borrowing the language of work, Sayers exposes the hidden transaction inside certain kinds of intimacy - and dares you to see it as a hazard, not a virtue.