'Gaudy Night'

When I was an undergraduate, my father sent me a copy of the Dorothy Sayers novel "Gaudy Night." I keep returning to it, and I have many favorite passages. Here are two.

From Chapter xiv:

"It appears to be altogether a choice of evils. But you have only to command. My ear is open like a greedy shark to catch the tunings of a voice divine."

"Great heavens! Where did you find that?"

"That, though you might not believe it, is the crashing conclusion of a sonnet by Keats. True, it is a youthful effort; but there are some things that even youth does not excuse."

"Let us go down-stream. I need solitude to recover from the shock."

At least one edition of Keats turns three sonnets on women into one; was it really the conclusion?

From Chapter xxiii:

He was wrapt in the motionless austerity with which all genuine musicians listen to genuine music. Harriet was musician enough to respect this aloofness; she knew well enough that the ecstatic rapture on the face of the man opposite meant only that he was hoping to be thought musical, and that the elderly lady over the way, waving her fingers to the beat, was a musical moron.

I'm hopeless with music, and that confession is painful from the daughter of a musician. I've been known to bang my head.

OK. One more Sayers quotation, back in Chapter xiv:

"Would you have your youth back if you could, Harriet?"

"Not for the world."

"Nor I. Not for anything you could give me. Perhaps that's an exaggeration. For one thing you could give me I might want twenty years of my life back. But not the same twenty years. And if I went back to my twenties, I shouldn't want the same thing."