Thoughtful Thursday: an Unfeminine Lack of Tact

"How they got the body there? Yes, I thought you'd be wondering that. I've been wondering, too. Uncle doesn't think it's nice of me to wonder anything of the sort. But it really makes things easier to do a little wondering, I mean, if you're once interested in a thing it makes it seem less real. That's not the right word, though."

"Less personal?"

"Yes; that's what I mean. You begin to imagine how it all happened, and gradually it gets to feel more like something you've made up."

"H'm!" said Wimsey. "If that's the way your mind works, you'll be a writer one day."

"Do you think so? How funny! That's what I want to be. But why?"

"Because you have the creative imagination, which works outwards, till finally you will be able to stand outside your own experience and see it as something you have made, existing independently of yourself. You're lucky."

"Do you really think so?" Hilary looked excited.

"Yes- but your luck will come more at the end of life than at the beginning, because the other sort of people won't understand the way your mind works. They will start by thinking you dreamy and romantic, and then they'll be surprised to discover that you're really hard and heartless. They'll be quite wrong both times- but they won't ever know it, and YOU won't know it at first, and it'll worry you."

"But that's just what the girls say at school. How did you know? ... Though they're all idiots- mostly, that is."

"Most people are," said Wimsey, gravely, "but it isn't kind to tell them so. I expect you do tell them so. Have a heart; they can't help it..."

"That [farm over there] is Mr. Ashton's place. He's quite a well-to-do kind of man, one of the churchwardens. I liked him very much when I was a kid; he used to let me ride on the farmhorses."

"I've heard of him; he pulled my car out of the ditch one day- which reminds me, I ought to call and thank him personally."

"That means you want to ask him questions."

"If you DO see through people as clearly as that, you oughtn't to make it so brutally plain to them."

"That's what Uncle calls my unfeminine lack of tact. He says it comes of going to school and playing hockey."

~ Dorothy L. Sayers, excerpt from The Nine Tailors

~ A weekly post sharing a selection from a book I am currently reading ~

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A thoughtful quote can be the bridge that leads us farther
along the path of understanding ourselves and the world.