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Sudden success in golf is like the sudden acquisition of wealth. It is apt to unsettle and deteriorate the character. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I may as well tell you, here and now, that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant! -- P.g. Wodehouse
I call it rotten work, springing unexpected offspring on a fellow at the eleventh hour like this. -- P.g. Wodehouse
What I feel we ought to do at this juncture is to dash off somewhere where it's quiet and there aren't so many housesdancing the 'Blue Danube' and shove some tea into ourselves. And over the pot and muffins I shall have something veryimportant to say to you. -- P.g. Wodehouse
And of all the objects under my immediate advisement I noted this yacht with the most pleasure and approval. White in colour, in size resembling a young liner, it lent a decided tone to the Chuffnell Regis foreshore. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I turned on the pillow with a little moan, and at this juncture Jeeves entered with the vital oolong. I clutched at it like a drowning man at a straw hat. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I remember her telling me once that rabbits were the gnomes in attendance to the Fairy Queen and that the stars were God's daisy chain. Perfect rot, of course. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Judge of my chagrin and all that sort of thing, therefore, when, tottering to my room and switching on the light, I observed the foul features of young Bingo all over the pillow. -- P.g. Wodehouse
A little," panted Mrs. Peagrim, who, though she danced often and vigorously, was never in the best of condition, owing to her habit of neutralizing the beneficent effects of exercise by surreptitious candy-eating. "I'm a little out of breath. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She uttered a sound rather like an elephant taking its foot out of a mud hole in a Burmese teak forest. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Say what you will, there is something fine about our old aristocracy. I'll bet Trotsky couldn't hit a moving secretary with an egg on a dark night. -- P.g. Wodehouse
His brow was sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought and his air that of a man who, if he had said 'Hullo, girls', would have said it like someone in a Russian drama announcing that Grandpapa had hanged himself in the barn. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Well, the natives seemed fairly friendly, so I decided to stay the night. I made a mental note never to seem fairly friendly to an explorer. If you do, he always decides to stay the night. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Captain Bradbury's right eyebrow had now become so closely entangled with his left that there seemed no hope of ever extricating it without the aid of powerful machinery. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The coops were finished. They were not masterpieces, and I have seen chickens pause before them in deep thought, as who should say: "Now what in the world have we struck here?" But they were coops, within the meaning of the act, and we induced the hens to become tenants. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Very rapidly now Freddie realised that what he had been wishing for was a partner to share the perils of this enterprise which he had so rashly undertaken. In fact, not so much to share them as to take them off his shoulders altogether. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I wonder what Tommy Morris would have had to say to all this number 6-iron, number 12-iron, number 28-iron stuff. He probably wouldn't have said anything, just made one of those strange Scottish noises at the back of his throat like someone gargling. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I gave it up. The man annoyed me. I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie, but I was dashed if I could see why he couldn't do it with a bright and cheerful smile. -- P.g. Wodehouse
There is her sty,' he said, pointing a reverent finger as they crossed the little meadow dappled with buttercups and daisies. 'And that is my pigman Wellbeloved standing by it.' Myra -- P.g. Wodehouse
Have you lost the girl you love?' 'That's what I'm trying to figure out. I can't make up my mind. It all depends what construction you place on the words "I never want to see or speak to you again in this world or the next, you miserable fathead."' 'Did she say that? -- P.g. Wodehouse
When you are discovered by a householder - with revolver - in his parlor at half-past three in the morning, it is surely an injudicious move to lay stress on your proficiency as a burglar. The householder may be supposed to take that for granted. -- P.g. Wodehouse
No burglar wastes his time burgling authors. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Anyone looking at you would write you off as a brainless nincompoop with about as much intelligence as a dead rabbit. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Birds, except when broiled and in the society of a cold bottle, bored him stiff. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It just shows how one half of the world doesn't know how three quarts live. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It was one of those parties where you cough twice before you speak and then decide not to say it after all. -- P.g. Wodehouse
What I'm worrying about is what Tom is going to say when he starts talking."
"Uncle Tom?"
"I wish there was something else you could call him except 'Uncle Tom,' " Aunt Dahlia said a little testily. "Every time you do it, I expect to see him turn black and start playing the banjo. -- P.g. Wodehouse
And, anyway, no matter how much you may behave like the deaf adder of Scripture which, as you are doubtless aware, the more one piped, the less it danced, or words to that effect, I shall carry on as planned. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The cells smell is a great feature of French prisons. Ours in No.44 was one of those fine broad-shouldered up and coming young smells, which stand on both feet and look the world in the eye. We became very fond and proud of it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
If she ever turned into a werewolf, it would be one of those jolly breezy werewolves whom it is a pleasure to know. -- P.g. Wodehouse
About two hours afterwards Gethryn discovered a suitable retort, but, coming to the conclusion that better late than never does not apply to repartees, refrained from speaking it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I knew a chap who bumped his leg, and it turned black and had to be cut off at the knee.' 'You do seem to mix with the most extraordinary people. -- P.g. Wodehouse
But what is the love life of newts, if you boil it right down? Didn't you tell me once that they just waggled their tails at one another in the mating season?'
'Quite correct.'
I shrugged my shoulders. 'Well all right, if they like it. But it's not my idea of molten passion. -- P.g. Wodehouse
A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Aunt Agatha is like an elephant- not so much to look at, for in appearance she resembles more a well-bred vulture, but because she never forgets. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It sometimes seems to me that in this life we've all got to have trouble sooner or later, and some of us gets it bit by bit, spread out thin, so to speak, and a few of us gets it in a lump - biff! -- P.g. Wodehouse
However devoutly a girl may worship the man of her choice, there always comes a time when she feels an irresistible urge to haul off and let him have it in the neck. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Aunt Agatha's demeanor now was rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back. -- P.g. Wodehouse
There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I've often wondered why Nature, widely publicized being infinite in its wisdom, should have made the grave mistake of creating redheads, always so impulsive and quick on the trigger. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She was definitely the sort of girl who puts her hands over a husband's eyes, as he is crawling in to breakfast with a morning head, and says Guess who! -- P.g. Wodehouse
I love that girl, Bertie," he went on, when he'd finished coughing.
"Yes. Nice girl, of course."
He eyed me with deep loathing.
"Don't speak of her in that horrible casual way. She's an angel. An angel! -- P.g. Wodehouse
I went into the kitchen ten minutes back. The cat was sitting on the mat.
Beale's narrative style closely resembled that of a certain book I had read in my infancy. I wish I could remember its title. It was a well-written book. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Many lyricists rhyme as they pronounce, and their pronunciation is simply horrible. They can make "home" rhyme with "alone," and "saw" with "more," and go right off and look their innocent children in the eye without a touch of shame. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Cheer up, Crips, and keep smiling. That's the thing to do. If you go through life with a smile on your face, you'll be amazed how many people will come up to you and say 'What the hell are you grinning about? What's so funny?' Make you a lot of new friends. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Aunts Aren't Gentlemen -- P.g. Wodehouse
Do you realize a fraction of the awful things you have let me in for? How on earth am I to remember whether I go in before the chef or after the footman? I shan't have a peaceful minute while I'm in this place. -- P.g. Wodehouse
You don't get any five shillings out of me.' 'Oh, all right.' He sat silent for a space. 'Things happen to guys that don't kick in their protection money,' he said dreamily. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Love is a fever which, so to speak, drives off without wasting time on the address. -- P.g. Wodehouse
cats on hot bricks could take hints from me -- P.g. Wodehouse
Hell, it is well known, has no fury like a woman who wants her tea and can't get it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
You agreee with me that the situation is a lulu?
Certainly, a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, Sir. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Don't forget that in pushing policemen into duck ponds the follow through is everything. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He made a noise like a pig swallowing half a cabbage, -- P.g. Wodehouse
Sheh walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies; and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes. Another bit of bread and cheese, he said to the lad behind the bar. -- P.g. Wodehouse
There is no pathos more bitter than that of parting from someone we have never met. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Gussie and I, as I say, had rather lost touch, but all the same I was exercised about the poor fish, as I am about all my pals, close or distant, who find themselves treading upon Life's banana skins. -- P.g. Wodehouse
From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The first intimation I had that things were about to hot up was a pained and disapproving cough from the neighbourhood of the carpet. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Ah, well,' I said resignedly, 'if that's that, that's that, what?' 'So it would appear, sir.' 'Nothing to do but keep the chin up and the upper lip as stiff as can be managed. I think I'll go to bed with an improving book. Have you read The Mystery of the Pink Crayfish by Rex West? -- P.g. Wodehouse
I could not but feel that it was ironical that the old relative should have spoken disparagingly of fawns as a class, sneering at their timidity in that rather lofty and superior manner, for he himself could have walked straight into a gathering of these animals and no questions asked. -- P.g. Wodehouse
As a rule, from what I've observed, the American captain of industry doesn't do anything out of business hours. When he has put the cat out and locked up the office for the night, he just relapses into a state of coma from which he emerges only to start being a captain of industry again. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Hugo?' 'Millicent?' 'Is that you?' 'Yes. Is that you?' 'Yes.' Anything in the nature of misunderstanding was cleared away. It was both of them. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Back horses or go down to Throgmorton Street and try to take it away from the Rothschilds, and I will applaud you as a shrewd and cautious financier. But to bet at golf is pure gambling. -- P.g. Wodehouse
And he was, one could see, at peace with all the world. His daily round of tasks may or may not have been completed, but he was obviously off duty for the moment, and his whole attitude was that of a policeman with nothing on his mind but his helmet. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I must say my heart leaped up, as Jeeves tells me his does when he beholds a rainbow in the sky. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I mean, imagine how some unfortunate Master Criminal would feel, on coming down to do a murder at the old Grange, if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot, as well." ~ Bertram "Bertie" Wooster -- P.g. Wodehouse
It is not the being paid money in advance that jars the sensitive artist: it is the having to work. -- P.g. Wodehouse
In your walks about London you will sometimes see bent, haggard figures that look as if they had recently been caught in some powerful machinery. They are those fellows who got mixed up with Catsmeat when he was meaning well. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Vladimir specialized in grey studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page 380, when the muzhik decided to commit suicide. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I looked round the place. The moment of parting had come. I felt sad. The whole thing reminded me of one of those melodramas where they drive chappies out of the old homestead into the snow.
'Good-bye, Jeeves,' I said.
'Good-bye, sir.'
And I staggered out. -- P.g. Wodehouse
New York is a small place when it comes to the part of it that wakes up just as the rest is going to bed. -- P.g. Wodehouse
A girl who bonnets a policeman with an ashcan full of bottles is obviously good wife-and-mother timber. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Golf, like measles, should be caught young. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She did drive me in the Park the other day. I thought it rather a hopeful -- P.g. Wodehouse
The exquisite code of politeness of the Woosters prevented me clipping her one on the ear-hole, but I would have given a shilling to be able to do it. There seemed to me something deliberately fat-headed in the way she persisted in missing the gist. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I marmaladed a slice of toast with something of a flourish and I don't suppose I have ever come much closer to saying 'Tra la la' as I did the lathering for I was feeling in mid season form this morning. -- P.g. Wodehouse
There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I go in for what is known in the trade as 'light writing' and those who do that - humorists they are sometimes called - are looked down upon by the intelligentsia and sneered at. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Not only had its expression, as he spoke of Pauline, been that of a stuffed frog with a touch of the Soul's Awakening about it, but it -- P.g. Wodehouse
The man was goggling. His entire map was suffused with a rich blush. He looked like the Soul's Awakening done in pink. -- P.g. Wodehouse
We must always remember, however,' said Psmith gravely, 'that poets are also God's creatures. -- P.g. Wodehouse
But those who read thrillers are an impatient race. They chafe at scenic rhapsodies and want to get on to the rough stuff. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It has been well said that it is precisely these moments when we are feeling that ours is the world and everything that's in it that Fate selects for sneaking up on us with the rock in the stocking. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The only way of really finding out a man's true character is to play golf with him. In no other walk of life does the cloven hoof so quickly display itself. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She was standing by the barometer, which, if it had had an ounce of sense in its head, would have been pointing to 'Stormy' instead of 'Set Fair -- P.g. Wodehouse
a chap after the horses.' He had found the right -- P.g. Wodehouse
The funny thing was that he wasn't altogether a fool in other ways. Deep down in him there was a kind of stratum of sense. I had known him, once or twice, show an almost human intelligence. But to reach that stratum, mind you, you needed dynamite. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Bingo Little, under the influence of romantic love or, perhaps just under the influence;..once said,'There is no love without perfect trust','Who told you that?' asked Bertie Wooster incredulously. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Osbert Mulliner was simply unequal to the task of tackling cavemen. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his head first, and if it rings solid, don't hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Excuse me, I must go and putt -- P.g. Wodehouse
Some minds are like soup in a poor restaurant - better left unstirred. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It is not mere technical skill that makes a man a golfer, it is the golfing soul. -- P.g. Wodehouse
As an energetic Socialist, I do my best to see the good that is in him, but it's hard. Comrade Bristow's the most striking argument against the equality of man I've ever come across. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Aunt Agatha is my tough aunt, the one who eats broken bottles and conducts human sacrifices by the light of the full moon. -- P.g. Wodehouse
You don't construct your stories well, Pugsy. You start at the end, then go back to any part which happens to appeal to you at the moment, and eventually wind up at the beginning. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Many a time in the past, when an active operator on Wall Street, he had done things ... which would have caused raised eyebrows on the fo'c'sle of a pirate sloop - and done them without a blush. -- P.g. Wodehouse
XVIII. THE LOCHINVAR METHOD XIX. ON THE LAKE XX. A LESSON IN PICQUET -- P.g. Wodehouse
She had turned away and was watching a duck out on the lake. It was tucking into weeds, a thing I've never been able to understand anyone wanting to do. Though I suppose, if you face it squarely, they're no worse than spinach. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Just then the kid upset the milk over Freddie's trousers, and when he had come back after changing his clothes he began to talk about what a much-maligned man King Herod was. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Years before, when a boy, and romantic as most boys are, his lordship had sometimes regretted that the Emsworths, though an ancient clan, did not possess a Family Curse. How little he had suspected that he was shortly to become the father of it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Lord Marshmoreton: I wish I could get you see my point of view.
George Bevan: I do see your point of view. But dimly. You see, my own takes up such a lot of the foreground -- P.g. Wodehouse
You go away and have a nice cup of hot tea,' said the agent, soothingly, 'and you'll be as right as anything in the morning. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Jeeves' eyes had taken on the look of cautious reserve which you see in those of parrots, when offered half a banana by a stranger of whose bona fides they are not convinced. -- P.g. Wodehouse
If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean. At any moment you may be strolling peacefully along, and all the time Life's waiting around the corner to fetch you one. -- P.g. Wodehouse
They're soul mates. She has about as much brain as a retarded billiards ball, and he approximately the same. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I have never written a novel yet ... without doing 40,000 words or more and finding they were all wrong and going back and starting again, and this after filling 400 words with notes, mostly delirious, before getting into anything in the nature of a coherent scenario. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Providence looks after all the chumps of this world, and personally, I'm all for it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
[I'm] as broke as the ten commandments. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I'm a bit short on brain myself; the old bean would appear to have been constructed more for ornament than for use, don't you know ... -- P.g. Wodehouse
Jeeves, I'm engaged."
"I hope you will be very happy, sir."
"Don't be an ass. I'm engaged to Miss Bassett. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Tea, pa! said Charlotte, starting at the word like the old war-horse who hears the bugle; and we got down to it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Luck is a goddess not to be coerced and forcibly wooed by those who seek her favours. From such masterful spirits she turns away. But it happens sometimes that, if we put our hand in hers with the humble trust of a little child, she will have pity on us, and not fail us in our hour of need. -- P.g. Wodehouse
That is all, Augustus,' she said, and dismissed me with a gesture of loathing, as if I had been a green-fly that had fallen short of even the very moderate level of decency of the average run-of-the-mill green fly. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Do men who have got all their marbles go swimming in lakes with their clothes on? -- P.g. Wodehouse
Oh, is that my report, father?' said Mike, with a sort of sickly interest, much as a dog about to be washed might evince in his tub.'
- Mike and Psmith -- P.g. Wodehouse
There's no getting away from the fact that, if ever a man required watching, it's Steggles. Machiavelli could have taken his correspondence course. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Some say the tale related here Is amplified and twisted; Some say it isn't very clear That William Tell existed; Some say he freed his country so, The Governor demolished. Perhaps he did. I only know That taxes aren't abolished! -- P.g. Wodehouse
I could see exactly what must have happened. Insert a liberal dose of mixed spirits in a normally abstemious man, and he becomes a force. He does not stand around, twiddling his fingers and stammering. He acts. I -- P.g. Wodehouse
Alf Todd," said Ukridge, soaring to an impressive burst of imagery, "has about as much chance as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild cat's left ear with a red-hot needle. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The ideal girl ... would be kind. That was because she would also be extremely intelligent, and, being extremely intelligent, would have need of kindness to enable her to bear with a not very intelligent man like himself. -- P.g. Wodehouse
of the afternoon Mr. Fitz-Wattle---- -- P.g. Wodehouse
I had one of those ideas I do sometimes get, though admittedly a chump of the premier class. -- P.g. Wodehouse
You can't go by what a girl says, when she's giving you the devil for making a chump of yourself. It's like Shakespeare. Sounds well, but doesn't mean anything. -- P.g. Wodehouse
[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.
(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975) -- P.g. Wodehouse
I don't want to seem always to be criticizing your methods of voice production, Jeeves, I said, but I must inform you that that 'Well, sir' of yours is in many respects fully as unpleasant as your 'Indeed, sir? -- P.g. Wodehouse
One of the Georges - I forget which - once said that a certain number of hours' sleep each night - I cannot recall at the moment how many - made a man something which for the time being has slipped my memory. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I never was interested in politics. I'm quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent feeling. Just as I'm about to feel belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Ask the first lion cub you meet, and it will tell you that, once you've tasted blood, there is no pulling up, and it's the same with opening telegrams. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Wait a minute while I think," said Miss Peavey.
There was a pause. Miss Peavey sat with knit brows.
"How would it be ... " ventured Mr. Cootes.
"Cheese it!" said Miss Peavey.
Mr. Cootes cheesed it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required. -- P.g. Wodehouse
No, I am quite content with you, Bertie. By the way, I do dislike that name Bertie. I think I shall call you Harold. Yes, I am perfectly satisfied with you. You have many faults, of course. I shall be pointing some of them out when I am at leisure. -- P.g. Wodehouse
One more toot
just one single, solitary suggestion of the faintest shadow or suspicion of anything remotely approaching a toot
and may the Lord have mercy on your soul. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She laughed - a bit louder than I could have wished in my frail state of health, but then she is always a woman who tends to bring plaster falling from the ceiling when amused. -- P.g. Wodehouse
What would Jeeves do that for?"
"It struck me as rummy, too." ...
"I mean to say, it's nothing to Jeeves what sort of a face you have!"
"No!" said Cyril. He spoke a little coldly, I fancied. I don't know why. "Well, I'll be popping. Toodle-oo! -- P.g. Wodehouse
Bertie, it is imperative that you marry."
"But, dash it all ... "
"Yes! You should be breeding children to ... "
"No, really, I say, please!" I said, blushing richly. Aunt Agatha belongs to two or three of these women's clubs, and she keeps forgetting she isn't in the smoking-room. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them. -- P.g. Wodehouse
This was not Aunt Dahlia, my good and kindly aunt, but my Aunt Agatha, the one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It's curious how, when you're in love, you yearn to go about doing acts of kindness to everybody. -- P.g. Wodehouse
If you haven't realised by this time that I love you, and always shall love you, and have never loved anybody else, and never shall love anybody else, you're a fathead -- P.g. Wodehouse
I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He picked up one of the dead bats and covered it with his handkerchief. 'Somebody's mother,' he murmured reverently. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He couldn't have moved quicker if he had been the dachshund Poppet, who at this juncture was running round in circles, trying, if I read his thoughts aright, to work off the rather heavy lunch he had had earlier in the afternoon. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He looked like a vulture dissatisfied with its breakfast corpse. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Angela nearly got inhaled by a shark while aquaplaning. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Love is a delicate plant that needs constant tending and nurturing, and this cannot be done by snorting at the adored object like a gas explosion and calling her friends lice. -- P.g. Wodehouse
There occurred to me the simple epitaph which, when I am no more, I intend to have inscribed on my tombstone. It was this:
He was a man who acted from the best motives. There is one born every minute. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He groaned slightly and winced like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for lunch. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Well, you know what the Fulham Road's like. If your top-hat blows off into it, it has about as much chance as a rabbit at a dogshow. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Change of scene is the thing. I head of a man. Girl refused him. Man went abroad. Two months later girl wired him "Come back, Muriel." Man started to write out a reply; suddenly found that he couldn't remember girl's surname; so never answered at all, and lived happily ever after. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It is madness to come to country houses without one's bottle of Mickey Finns. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Woman is the unfathomable, incalculable mystery, the problem that we men can never hope to solve. -- P.g. Wodehouse
To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Alcohol is a misunderstood vitamin. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Whenever I get that sad, depressed feeling, I go out and kill a policeman. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Love, Miss Halliday, is a delicate plant. It needs tending, nurturing, assiduous fostering. This cannot be done by throwing the breakfast bacon at a husband's head. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Golf ... is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well. -- P.g. Wodehouse
You are sure that I would not be well advised to make certain excisions and eliminations? You do not think it would be a good thing to cut, to prune? I might, for example, delete the rather exhaustive excursus into the family life of the early Assyrians? -- P.g. Wodehouse
It's and odd thing, but however much an oficionado one may be of mysteries in book form, when they pop up in real life they seldom fail to give one the pip. -- P.g. Wodehouse
As a dancer, I out-Fred the nimblest Astaire. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Confidence, of course is an admirable asset to a golfer, but it should be an unspoken confidence. It is perilous to put it into speech. The gods of golf lie in wait to chasten the presumptious. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I don't know if you suffer in the same way, but with me the act of talking in the nature of real mashed potatoes always induces a sort of prickly sensation and a hideous feeling of shame, together with a marked starting of the pores. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Good God, Clarence! You look like a bereaved tapeworm. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The proprietor of the grocery store on the corner was bidding a silent farewell to a tomato which even he, though a dauntless optimist, had been compelled to recognize as having outlived its utility. -- P.g. Wodehouse
No fair-minded girl objects to a certain tinge of jealousy. Kept within proper bounds, it is a compliment; it makes for piquancy; it is the gin in the ginger-beer of devotion. But it should be a condiment, not a fluid. -- P.g. Wodehouse
When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I remember, back in England, the man I had before Jeeves sneaked off to a meeting on his evening out and come back and denounced me in front of a crowd of chappies I was giving a bit of supper to as a useless blot on the fabric of Society. -- P.g. Wodehouse
One prefers, of course, on all occasions to be stainless and above reproach, but, failing that, the next best thing is unquestionably to have got rid of the body. -- P.g. Wodehouse
But a thing I've often noticed is that when I've got something off my mind, it pretty nearly always happens that Fate sidles up and shoves on something else, -- P.g. Wodehouse
Furthermore, as is the case with so many of the younger literati, he dresses like a tramp cyclist, affecting turtleneck sweaters and grey flannel bags with a patch on the knee and conveying a sort of general suggestion of having been left out in the rain overnight in an ash can. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Of course, old man, I only saw the kid once, and then only for a moment, but - but it was an ugly sort of kid, wasn't it, if I remember rightly?'
'As ugly as that? '
I looked again, and honesty compelled me to be frank.
'I don't see how it could have been, old chap. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He looked at me like Lillian Gish coming out of a swoon.
"Is this Bertie Wooster talking?" he said, pained.
"Yes, it jolly well is!"
"Bertie, old man," said Bingo, patting me gently here and there, "reflect! We were at school - "
"Oh, all right! -- P.g. Wodehouse
Those who know Bertram Wooster best are aware that he is a man of sudden, strong enthusiasms and that, when in the grip of one of these, he becomes a remorseless machine - tense, absorbed, single-minded. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Feminine psychology is admittedly odd, sir. The poet Pope ... "
"Never mind about the poet Pope, Jeeves."
"No, sir."
"There are times when one wants to hear all about the poet Pope and times when one doesn't."
"Very true, sir. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Wooster: Wait a second; this white mess jacket is brand new.
Jeeves: I assumed it had got into your wardrobe by mistake, sir, or else it had been placed there by your enemies. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Look in at the Drones and ask the first fellow you meet 'Can the fine spirit of the Woosters be crushed?' and he will offer you attractive odds against such a contingency. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Would you say my head was like a pumpkin, Wooster?' 'Not a bit, old man.' 'Not like a pumpkin?' 'No, not like a pumpkin. A touch of the dome of St Paul's, perhaps. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She's a sort of human vampire-bat -- P.g. Wodehouse
This Miss Wooster that I knew married a man named Spenser. Was she any relation?"
"She is my Aunt Agatha," I replied, and I spoke with a good deal of bitterness, trying to suggest by my manner that he was exactly the sort of man, in my opinion, who would know my Aunt Agatha. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Lady Glossip: Mr. Wooster, how would you support a wife? Bertie Wooster: Well, I suppose it depends on who's wife it was, a little gentle pressure beneath the elbow while crossing a busy street usually fits the bill. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Yes, sir,' said Jeeves in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I am Psmith," said the old Etonian reverently. "There is a preliminary P before the name. This, however, is silent. Like the tomb. Compare such words as ptarmigan, psalm, and phthisis. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The first thing to do,' said Psmith, 'is to ascertain that such a place as Clapham Common really exists. One has heard of it, of course, but has its existence ever been proved? I think not. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Another of these strong silent men. The world is full of us. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Some time ago," he said, "
how long it seems!
I remember saying to a young friend of mine of the name of Spiller, 'Comrade Spiller, never confuse the unusual with the impossible.' It is my guiding rule in life. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Mere surprise, however, was never enough to prevent Psmith talking. He -- P.g. Wodehouse
Psmith is the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a plate with watercress round it, thus enabling me to avoid the blood, sweat and tears inseparable from an author's life. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I am Psmith. I sub-edit. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He wore the unmistakable look of a man about to be present at a row between women, and only a wet cat in a strange back yard bears itself with less jauntiness than a man faced by such a prospect. -- P.g. Wodehouse
My motto is 'Love and let love' - with the one stipulation that people who love in glass-houses should breathe on the windows. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He put the good old cup of tea softly on the table by my bed, and I took a refreshing sip. Just right, as usual. Not too hot, not too sweet, not to weak, not too strong, not too much milk, and not a drop spilled in the saucer. A most amazing cove, Jeeves. So dashed competent in every respect. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I sank into a c. and passed an agitated h. over the b. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It seems to me that you and I were made for each other. I am your best friend's best friend and we both have a taste for stealing other people's jewellery. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Much has been written on the subject of bed-books. The general consensus of opinion is that a gentle, slow-moving story makes the best opiate -- P.g. Wodehouse
There, my boy," he said. "It's awfully kind of you, Mr. Windlebird." "My dear boy, don't mention it. If you're satisfied, I'm sure I am." Mr. Windlebird always spoke the truth when he could. He spoke it now. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I'm lonely, Jeeves.'
'You have a great many friends,sir.'
'What's the good of friends?'
'Emerson,' I reminded him,'says a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature,sir.'
'Well, you can tell Emerson from me next time you see him that he's an ass.'
'Very good, sir. -- P.g. Wodehouse
To find a man's true character, play golf with him. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She paused, and heaved a sigh that seemed to come straight up from the cami-knickers. A silence ensued. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It was not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door, but 'twas enough - it served. Stubbing it squarely with his toe, Henry shot forward, all arms and legs. It -- P.g. Wodehouse
i gave a start as if goosed from behind -- P.g. Wodehouse
I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Girls do go for the finely-chiselled. And apart from his looks, he's and artist, and there's something about artists that seems to act on the other sex like catnip on cats. -- P.g. Wodehouse
As a child of eight Mr. Trout had once kissed a girl of six under the mistletoe at a Christmas party, but there his sex life had come to abrupt halt. -- P.g. Wodehouse
In a series of events, all of which had been a bit thick, this, in his opinion, achieved the maximum of thickness. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Some slight friction threatening in the Balkans, sir. -- P.g. Wodehouse
A drawback to success in life is that failure, when it does come, acquires an exaggerated importance. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I remained motionless, like a ventriloquist's dummy whose ventriloquist has gone off to the local and left it sitting. -- P.g. Wodehouse
As for Gussie Finknottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming on sight. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I was endeavouring to adjust the faculties, which were in urgent need of a bit of first-aid treatment. -- P.g. Wodehouse
As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom. -- P.g. Wodehouse
As life goes on, don't you find that all you need is about two real friends, a regular supply of books, and a Peke? -- P.g. Wodehouse
I don't get your drift."
"I will continue snowing. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He was no prude, but he had those decent prejudices of which no self-respecting man can wholly rid himself, however broad-minded he may try to be. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He seemed a little uneasy, and he welcomed me with something of the gratitude of the shipwrecked mariner who sights a sail. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Peculiarity of golf, as of love, that it temporarily changes the natures of its victims; -- P.g. Wodehouse
Don't they put aunts in Turkey in sacks and drop them in the Bosphorus?' 'Odalisques, sir, I understand. Not aunts. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I suppose the cave-woman sometimes felt rather relieved when everything was settled for her with a club, but I'm sure the caveman must have had a hard time ridding himself of the thought that he had behaved like a cad and taken a mean advantage. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Mr. Carlisle became brisk. "Baby," he said, as Napoleon might have said to one of his Marshals when instructing him in his latest plan of campaign ... -- P.g. Wodehouse
I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments. -- P.g. Wodehouse
What magic there is in a girl's smile! It is the raisin which, dropped in the yeast of male complacency, induces fermentation. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She had more curves than a scenic railway -- P.g. Wodehouse
You see, the catch about portrait painting
I've looked into the thing a bit - is that you can't start
painting portraits till people come along and ask you to, and
they won't come and ask you to until you've painted a lot first.
This makes it kind of difficult for a chappie. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Mary, in these days, simply couldn't see that he was on the earth. She looked round him, above him, and through him, but never at him; -- P.g. Wodehouse
Still, he could balance himself with one hand on an inverted ginger-ale bottle while revolving a barrel on the soles of his feet. There is good in all of us. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He was always inclined to read a fictitious sombreness into things when the shadows began to creep over the world and it was still too early for a cocktail. -- P.g. Wodehouse
That's always the way in this world. The chappies you'd like to lend money to won't let you, whereas the chappies you don't want to lend it to will do everything except actually stand you on your head and lift the specie out of your pockets. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I am told by those who know that there are six varieties of hangover-the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie, and his manner suggested that he had got them all. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Mr Wingham has the advantage of being on the premises. He and the young lady play duets after dinner, which acts as a bond. Mr Little on these occasions, I understand, prowls about in the road, chafing visibly. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It was one of those still evenings you get in the summer, when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The brains of members of the Press departments of motion-picture studios resemble soup at a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The boy is of an outspoken disposition, and had made an opprobrious remark respecting my personal appearance."
"What did he say about your appearance?"
"I have forgotten, sir," said Jeeves, with a touch of austerity. "But it was opprobrious. -- P.g. Wodehouse
There is nothing an author today has to guard himself more carefully against than the Saga Habit. The least slackening of vigilance and the thing has gripped him. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Never mind," I said crisply. "I have my methods." I dug out my entire stock of manly courage, breathed a short prayer and let her have it right in the thorax. -- P.g. Wodehouse
For a time the broken heart, and then suddenly the healing conviction that one is jolly well out of it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
His manner had the offensive jauntiness of the man who has had a cold bath when he might just as easily have had a hot one. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Now, I am a mixer. I can't help it. It's my nature. I like men. I like the taste of their shoes, the smell of their legs, the sound of their voices. It may be weak of me, but a man has only to speak to me, and a sort of thrill goes down my spine and sets my tail wagging. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I have been studying the principles of socialism deeply of late, and I came to the conclusion that I must join the cause. It looked good to me. You work for the equal distribution of property and start in by swiping all you can and sitting on it. Ah, noble scheme! Me for it! -- P.g. Wodehouse
A roll and butter and a small coffee seemed the only things on the list that hadn't been specially prepared by the nastier-minded members of the Borgia family for people they had a particular grudge against, so I chose them. -- P.g. Wodehouse
But then, at meals, my attention is pretty well riveted on the foodstuffs. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Work, the what's-its-name of the thingummy and the thing-um-a-bob of the what d'you-call-it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Tut!' I said. 'What did you say?' 'I said "Tut!"' 'Say it once again, and I'll biff you where you stand. I've enough to endure without being tutted at. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Between an egg that is fried and an egg that is cremated there is a wide and substantial difference. -- P.g. Wodehouse
There is a point beyond which the human brain loses its kinship with the Infinite and becomes a mere seething mass of deleterious passions. Malays, -- P.g. Wodehouse
She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The storm is over, there is sunlight in my heart. I have a glass of wine and sit thinking of what has passed. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Tell him my future is in his hands and that, if the wedding bells ring out, he can rely on me, even unto half my kingdom. Well, call it ten quid. Jeeves would exert himself with ten quid on the horizon, what? -- P.g. Wodehouse
Mere abuse is no criticism. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Tell me," said Ashe gratefully, leaning forward in an attitude of attention, "all about the lining of your stomach. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Suiffy, have you ever felt a sort of strange emptiness in the heart? A sort of aching void of the soul?'
'Oh, rather!'
'What do you do about it?'
'I generally take a couple of cocktails. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Well, all right. Something in what you say, I suppose. Consider you treacherous worm and contemptible, spineless cowardly custard, but have booked Spink-Bottle. Stay where you are, then, and I hope you get run over by an omnibus. Love. Travers -- P.g. Wodehouse
This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Bar a weekly wrestle with the "Pink 'Un" and an occasional dip into the form book I'm not much of a lad for reading, and my sufferings as I tackled The Woman (curse her!) Who Braved All were pretty fearful. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It looked something like a pen wiper and something like a piece of hearth-rug. A second and keener inspection revealed it as a Pekinese puppy. -- P.g. Wodehouse
...though the conversation always touched an exceptionally high level of brilliance, there was apt to be a good deal of sugar thrown about. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She was one of those women who kind of numb a fellow's faculties. She made me feel as if I were ten years old and had been brought into the drawing-room in my Sunday clothes to say how-d'you-do. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Jeeves."
"Sir?"
"Are you busy just now?"
"No, sir."
"I mean, not doing anything in particular?"
"No, sir. It is my practice at this hour to read some improving book; but, if you desire my services, this can easily be postponed, or, indeed, abandoned altogether. -- P.g. Wodehouse
This is the age of the specialist, and years ago Rollo had settled on his career. Even as a boy, hardly capable of connected thought, he had been convinced that his speciality, the one thing he could do really well, was to inherit money. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The cosy glow which had been enveloping the Duke became shot through by a sudden chill. It was as if he had been luxuriating in a warm shower bath, and some hidden hand had turned on the cold tap. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I paused, partly for breath, and partly because I felt I had said enough. I stood there, waiting for her reply, wishing I had a throat lozenge to suck. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I shuddered from stem to stern, as stout barks do when buffeted by the waves. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Six of the juiciest from a cane of the type that biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder, as the fellow said. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Well, why do you want a political career? Have you ever been in the House of Commons and taken a good square look at the inmates? As weird a gaggle of freaks and sub-humans as was ever collected in one spot. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The Duke of Dunstable had one-way pockets.
He would walk ten miles in the snow to chisel an orphan out of tuppence. -- P.g. Wodehouse
His eyes were rolling in their sockets, and his face had taken on the colour and expression of a devout tomato. I could see he loved like a thousand bricks. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It would seem to be an inexorable law of Nature that no man shall shine at both ends. If he has a high forehead and a thirst for wisdom, his fox-trotting (if any) shall be as the staggerings of the drunken; while, if he is a good dancer, he is nearly always petrified from the ears upward. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I was as limpid as dammit. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She was a shrewd woman, and knew that the art of life is to know when to stop talking. What words have accomplished, too many words can undo. "Good-bye. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Sex attraction is so purely a question of the taste of the individual that the wise man never argues about it. He accepts its vagaries as part of the human mystery, and leaves it at that. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I say!" he said. "Are you broke?"
Nelly laughed.
"Am I? If dollars were doughnuts, I wouldn't even have the hole in the
middle. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Statisticians estimate that crime among good golfers is lower than in any class of the community except possibly bishops. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The test of a great golfer is his ability to recover from a bad start. -- P.g. Wodehouse
They were real golfers, for real golf is a thing of the spirit, not of mere mechanical excellence of stroke. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Reflect, old man! We have been pals for years. Your mother likes me."
"No, she doesn't."
"Well, anyway, we were at school together and you owe me a tenner."
"Oh, well," he said in a resigned sort of voice. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He was really only a sort of detective, a species -- P.g. Wodehouse
She looked like something that might have occured to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments. -- P.g. Wodehouse
There's too much of that where-every-prospect-pleases-and-only-man-is-vile stuff buzzing around for my taste. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She said I would find Oswald out in the grounds, and such is a mother's love that she spoke as if that were a bit of a boost for the grounds and an inducement to go there. -- P.g. Wodehouse
This woman always made Freddie feel as if he were being disemboweled by some clumsy amateur. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Beggars approached the task of trying to persuade perfect strangers to bear the burden of their maintenance with that optimistic vim which makes all the difference. It was one of those happy mornings. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Just as you say, sir. There is a letter on the tray, sir."
"By Jove, Jeeves, that was practically potry. Rhymed, did you notice? -- P.g. Wodehouse
Water!' cried Marie.
'Vinegar!' recommended the bell-boy.
'Eu-de-Cologne!' said Bill.
'Pepper!' said Lord Tidmouth.
Mary had another suggestion.
'Give her air!'
So had the bell-boy.
'Slap her hands!'
Lord Tidmouth went further.
'Sit on her head!' he advised. -- P.g. Wodehouse
[He] saw that a peculiar expression had come into his nephew's face; an expression a little like that of a young hindu fakir who having settled himself on his first bed of spikes is beginning to wish that he had chosen one of the easier religions. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I clutched at the brow. The mice in my interior had now got up an informal dance and were buck-and-winging all over the place like a bunch of Nijinskys. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I hardly knew what to do. I wanted, of course, to rush down to Washington Square and grip the poor blighter silently by the hand; and then, thinking it over, I hadn't the nerve. Absent treatment seemed the touch. I gave it him in waves. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The stationmaster's whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I drew a deepish breath. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Some girls are like ants in your pants -- P.g. Wodehouse
I must explain Henry early, to avoid disappointment. -- P.g. Wodehouse
With each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature. -- P.g. Wodehouse
There was the man who seemed to be attempting to decieve his ball and lull it into a false sense of security by looking away from it and then making a lightning slash in the apparent hope of catching it off its guard. -- P.g. Wodehouse
When it comes to letting the world in on the secrets of his heart, he has about as much shrinking reticence as a steam calliope. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I mean, if you're asking a fellow to come out of a room so that you can dismember him with a carving knife, it's absurd to tack a 'sir' on to every sentence. The two things don't go together. -- P.g. Wodehouse
What are you giving us?"
"Cold consomme, a cutlet, and a savoury, sir. With lemon-squash, iced."
"Well, I don't see how that can hurt him. Don't go getting carried away by the excitement of the thing and start bringing in coffee. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Mr Pett, receiving her cold glance squarely between the eyes, felt as if he were being disembowelled by a clumsy amateur. -- P.g. Wodehouse
No one so dislikes being punished unjustly as the person who might have been punished justly on scores of previous occasions, if he had only been found out. -- P.g. Wodehouse
One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation. -- P.g. Wodehouse
But why do you want me? I mean, what am I? Ask yourself that."
"I often have. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The thought of being engaged to a girl who talked openly about fairies being born because stars blew their noses, or whatever it was, frankly appalled me. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Boil the whole question of old age down, and what it amounts to is that a man is young as long as he can dance without getting lumbago, and, if he cannot dance, he is never young at all. -- P.g. Wodehouse
What you want," I said, "is to look out for a chance and save her from drowning."
"I can't swim."
That was Freddie Bullivant all over. A dear old chap in a thousand ways, but no help to a fellow, if you know what I mean. -- P.g. Wodehouse
What is Love compared with holing out before your opponent? -- P.g. Wodehouse
Watching you at work, I was reminded of the young lady of Natchez, whose clothes were all tatters and patches. In alluding to which, she would say, Well, Ah itch, and wherever ah itches, Ah scratches. -- P.g. Wodehouse
You can't fling the hands up in a passionate gesture when you are driving a car at fifty miles an hour. Otherwise, I should have done so. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It is true of course, that I have a will of iron, but it can be switched off if the circumstances seem to demand it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Jeeves, whatever his moral defects, would never go about in skirts calling me Bertie. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Bertie, old man," said young Bingo earnestly, "for the last two weeks I've been comforting the sick to such an extent that, if I had a brother and you brought him to me on a sick-bed at this moment, by Jove, old man, I'd heave a brick at him. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He was white and shaken, like a dry martini. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I expect I shall feel better after tea. -- P.g. Wodehouse
No novelists any good except me. Sovietski
yah! Nastikoff
bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me. -- P.g. Wodehouse
If it were not for quotations, conversations between gentlemen would consist of an endless series of 'what-ho!'s. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Gussie opened his vaudeville career -- P.g. Wodehouse
I should think it extremely improbable that anyone ever wrote for money. Naturally, when he has written something, he wants to get as much for it as he can, but that is a very different thing from writing for money. -- P.g. Wodehouse
You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower. -- P.g. Wodehouse
she was usually keenly susceptible to weather conditions and reveled in sunshine like a kitten. -- P.g. Wodehouse
There was a moment's suspense while Conscience and Sheer Wickedness fought the matter out inside him, and then Conscience, which had started on the encounter without enthusiasm, being obviously flabby and out of condition, threw up the sponge. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I had staked all on Gussie making a favourable impression on his hostess, basing my confidence on the fact that he was one of those timid, obsequious, teacup-passing, thin-bread- and-butter-offering, yes-men whom women of my Aunt Dahlia's type nearly always like at first sight. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I simply said he was a detective, and let it go at that, I should be obtaining the reader's interest under false pretences. He was really only a sort of detective, a species of sleuth. At Stafford's International Investigation Bureau, in the Strand, -- P.g. Wodehouse
If you could call the thing a horse. If it hadn't shown a flash of speed in the straight, it would have got mixed up with the next race. -- P.g. Wodehouse
To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements. Being there was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It is futile to advance the argument that glasses are unromantic. They are not. I know, because I wear them myself, and I am a singularly romantic figure, whether in my rimless, my Oxford gold-bordered, or the plain gent's spectacles which I wear in the privacy of my study. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Many a man may look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Liz," said Mr. Cootes, lost in admiration, "when it comes to doping out a scheme, you're the snake's eyebrows! -- P.g. Wodehouse
What are the chances of a cobra biting Harold, Jeeves?"
"Slight, I should imagine, sir. And in such an event, knowing the boy as intimately as I do, my anxiety would be entirely for the snake. -- P.g. Wodehouse
A lesser moustache, under the impact of that quick, agonised expulsion of breath, would have worked loose at the roots. -- P.g. Wodehouse
An apple a day, if well aimed, keeps the doctor away. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The last few minutes of waiting in a cupboard are always the hardest. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The scheme had been, if I remember, that after lunch I should go off and caddy for Honoria on a shopping tour down Regent Street; but when she got up and started collecting me and the rest of her things, Aunt Agatha stopped her. -- P.g. Wodehouse
In the spring, Jeeves, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove."
"So I have been informed, sir."
"Right ho! Then bring me my whangee, my yellowest shoes, and the old green Homburg. I'm going into the Park to do pastoral dances. -- P.g. Wodehouse
At that moment the gong sounded, and the genial host came tumbling downstairs like the delivery of a ton of coals. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Are there any books of that sort nowadays? The only ones I ever see mentioned in the papers are about married couples who find life grey, and can't stick each other at any price. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The blighter's manner was so cold and unchummy that I bit the bullet and had a dash at being airy.
"Oh, well, tra-la-la!" I said.
"Precisely, sir," said Jeeves. -- P.g. Wodehouse
If I might suggest, sir - it is, of course, merely a palliative - but it has often been found in times of despondency that the assumption of formal evening dress has a stimulating effect on the morale. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Golf, like the measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious. -- P.g. Wodehouse
You won't mind my calling you Comrade, will you? I've just become a socialist. It's a great scheme. You ought to be one. You work for the equal distribution of property, and start by collaring all you can and sitting on it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
What if he does think you the world's premier louse? Don't we all? -- P.g. Wodehouse
Nothing to be done about it except give her a reproachful look. I did this. It made no impression whatever, and she proceeded. -- P.g. Wodehouse
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever been envious of another writer?
WODEHOUSE
No, never. I'm really such a voracious reader that I'm only too grateful to get some stuff I can read. -- P.g. Wodehouse
A dog without influence or private means, if he is to make his way in the world, must have either good looks or amiability. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Come on," he said. "Bring the poker."
I brought the tongs as well. I felt like it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I shoved on a dressing-gown, and flew downstairs like a mighty, rushing wind. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She gave the impression of smiling with difficulty, possibly for fear of getting wrinkles. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Lord Emsworth could conceive of no way in which Freddie could be of value to a dog-biscuit firm, except possibly as a taster. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Mother always used to say, 'If you want to succeed in life, please the women. They are the real bosses. The men don't count. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It was all Mrs. Waddington could do to refrain from hurling a bust of Edgar Allan Poe at her head. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He was a long, stripy policeman, who flowed out of his uniform at odd spots, as if Nature, setting out to make a constable, had had a good deal of material left over which she had not liked to throw away but hardly seemed able to fit into the general scheme. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The ideal adventurer needs ... the quality of not being content to mind his own affairs ... -- P.g. Wodehouse
Like so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Rex Stout's narrative and dialogue could not be improved, and he passes the supreme test of being rereadable. I don't know how many times I have reread the Wolfe stories, but plenty. I know exactly what is coming and how it is all going to end, but it doesn't matter. That's writing. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I sank into a chair and mopped the frontal bone. Not for many a long day had I been in such a doodah -- P.g. Wodehouse
Warm-hearted! I should think he has to wear asbestos vests! -- P.g. Wodehouse
Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Jeeves, you really are a specific dream-rabbit."
"Thank you, miss. I am glad to have given satisfaction. -- P.g. Wodehouse
You know, with the most charitable feelings towards him, there are moments when you can't help thinking that young Bingo ought to be in some sort of a home. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The Primrose Way. National problems had ceased to interest the citizens. Local problems left them cold. Their minds were riveted to the exclusion of all else on the problem of how to secure seats. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It ought to be a criminal offence for women to dye their hair. Especially red. What the devil do women do that sort of thing for? -- P.g. Wodehouse
Like one kissed by a goddess in a dream, he walked on air; and, while one is walking on air, it is easy to overlook the boulders in the path. -- P.g. Wodehouse
But the southwest wind of Spring brings also remorse. We catch the vague spirit of unrest in the air and we regret our misspent youth. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Never put anything on paper, my boy, and never trust a man with a small black moustache. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea. -- P.g. Wodehouse
If girls realized their responsibilities they would be so careful when they smiled that they would probably abandon the practice altogether. There are moments in a man's life when a girl's smile can have as important results as an explosion of dynamite. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He was more like something out of Dickens than anything human. -- P.g. Wodehouse
You must meet old Rowbotham, Bertie. A delightful chap. Wants to massacre the bourgeoisie, sack Park Lane and disembowel the hereditary aristocracy. Well, nothing could be fairer than that, what? -- P.g. Wodehouse
He scattered his aitches as a fountain its sprays in a strong wind. He was very earnest. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She ignored my observation. This generally happens with me. Show me a woman, I sometimes say, and I will show you someone who is going to ignore my observations. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Bicky rocked, like a jelly in a high wind. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The march of civilisation has given the modern girl a vocabulary and an ability to use it which her grandmother never had -- P.g. Wodehouse
And then, just when I was beginning to think I might safely pop down in that direction and gather up the dropped threads, so to speak, time, instead of working the healing wheeze, went and pulled the most awful bone and put the lid on it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Judges, as a class, display, in the matter of arranging alimony, that reckless generosity which is found only in men who are giving away someone else's cash. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Well, there it is. That's Jeeves. Where others merely smite the brow and clutch the hair, he acts. Napoleon was the same. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He was one of those earnest, persevering dancers
the kind that have taken twelve correspondence lessons. -- P.g. Wodehouse
There is enough sadness in life without having fellows like Gussie Fink-Nottle going about in sea boots. -- P.g. Wodehouse
hoping that this was some jolly practical joke and that the real chap would shortly jump out from behind a chair and say "Boo! -- P.g. Wodehouse
I hadn't the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself. -- P.g. Wodehouse
When you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It is the bungled crime that brings remorse. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She came leaping towards me, like Lady Macbeth coming to get first-hand news from the guest-room. -- P.g. Wodehouse
ought I to dress it? What I mean is, the first act -- P.g. Wodehouse
The Paddock was one of those medium-sized houses with a goodish bit of very tidy garden and a carefully rolled gravel drive curving past a shrubbery that looked as if it had just come back from the dry cleaner - the sort of house you take one look at and say to yourself, Somebody's aunt lives there. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He's such a dear, Mr. Garnet. A beautiful, pure, bred Persian. He has taken prizes."
"He's always taking something - generally food. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Hypatia, like all girls who intend to be good wives, made it a practice to look on any suggestions thrown out by her future lord and master as fatuous and futile. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I pity the shrimp that matches wits with you Jeeves -- P.g. Wodehouse
Marriage isn't a motion-picture close-up with slow fade-out on the embrace. It's a partnership, and what's the good of a partnership if your heart's not in it? It's like collaborating with a man you dislike.... -- P.g. Wodehouse
Skiing consists of wearing $3,000 worth of clothes and equipment and driving 200 miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and drink. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I attribute my whole success in life to a rigid observance of the fundamental rule - Never have yourself tattooed with any woman's name, not even her initials. -- P.g. Wodehouse
You're one of those guys who can make a party just by leaving it. It's a great gift. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Dark hair fell in a sweep over his forehead. He looked like a man who would write vers libre, as indeed he did. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I suppose he must have taken about a nine or something in hats. Shows what a rotten thing it is to let your brain develop too much. -- P.g. Wodehouse
a chap who's supposed to stop chaps pinching things from chaps having a chap come along and pinch something from him. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I'm all for rational enjoyment, and so forth, but I think a fellow makes himself conspicuous when he throws soft-boiled eggs at the electric fan -- P.g. Wodehouse
Everything is relative. you, for instance, are my relative. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Won't you have an egg or something? Or a sausage or something? Or something?'
'No, thank you.'
She spoke as if she belonged to an anti-sausage society or a league for the suppression of eggs..
There was another slightly frappe silence. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I turned round and Jeeves shied like a startled mustang. -- P.g. Wodehouse
You are falling into your old error, Jeeves, of thinking that Gussie is a parrot. Fight against this. I shall add the oz. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Lady Kimbuck gave tongue. She was Lord Evenwood's sister. She spent a very happy widowhood interfering in the affairs of the various branches of her family. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He had that extra four or five inches of neck which disqualifies a man for high honors in the beauty competition -- P.g. Wodehouse
Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Lady Constance's lips tightened, and a moment passed during which it seemed always a fifty-fifty chance that a handsome silver ink-pot would fly through the air in the direction of her brother's head. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The general effect was rather as if I had swallowed six-pennorth of dynamite and somebody touched it off inside me. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Lord Emsworth belonged to the people-like-to-be-left-alone-to-amuse-themselves-when-they-come-to-a-place school of hosts -- P.g. Wodehouse
She is a waitress at his lordships club.
My God! The Proletariat!
The lower middle classes, sir.
Well, yes, by stretching it a bit, perhaps. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Jeeves, Mr Little is in love with that female."
"So I gathered, sir. She was slapping him in the passage."
I clutched my brow.
"Slapping him?"
"Yes, sir. Roguishly. -- P.g. Wodehouse
There's no doubt about it, being a policeman warps a man's mind and ruins that sunny faith in his fellow human beings which is the foundation of a lovable character. There seems to be no way of avoiding this. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I did not rush in with the vim I would have displayed a year or so earlier, before Life had made me the grim, suspicious man I am to-day: -- P.g. Wodehouse
What ho!" I said.
"What ho!" said Motty.
"What ho! What ho!"
"What ho! What ho! What ho!"
After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Filled with a coward rage that dares to burn but does not dare to blaze, Lord Emsworth coughed a cough that was undisguisedly a bronchial white flag. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It's brain," I said; "pure brain! What do you do to get like that, Jeeves? I believe you must eat a lot of fish, or something. Do you eat a lot of fish, Jeeves?"
"No, sir."
"Oh, well, then, it's just a gift, I take it; and if you aren't born that way there's no use worrying. -- P.g. Wodehouse
My earnest hope is that the entire remainder of my existence will be one round of unruffled monotony. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I always strive, when I can, to spread sweetness and light. There have been several complaints about it. -- P.g. Wodehouse
A cad of the lowest order with a soul as black as his fingernails. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Didn't Frankenstein get married?"
"Did he?" said Eggy. "I don't know. I never met him. Harrow man, I expect. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I was in rare fettle and the heart had touched a new high. I don't know anything that braces one up like finding you haven't got to get married after all. -- P.g. Wodehouse
There is nothing that so satisfactorily unites individuals who have been so unfortunate as to quarrel amongst themselves as a strong mutual dislike for some definite person. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Writing my books I enjoy. It is the thinking them out that is apt to blot the sunshine from my life. -- P.g. Wodehouse
There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Lady Underhill, having said all she had to say, recovered her breath and began to say it again. Frequent iteration was one of her strongest weapons. As her brother Edwin, who was fond of homely imagery, had often observed, she could talk the hind-leg off a donkey. "You -- P.g. Wodehouse
He sat looking at it with his eyes protruding in the manner popularized by snails, looking like something stuffed by a taxidermist who had learned his job from a correspondence course and had only got as far as lesson three. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I wish people wouldn't tell me I can't do things. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He looks much more like a lobster than most lobsters do. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Something that might have been a very hard and knobbly leg of mutton smote Lord Emsworth violently behind the ear:the sun was turned off at the main: the stars came out, many of them of a singular brightness. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He shimmered out, and I sat up in bed with that rather unpleasant feeling you get sometimes that you're going to die in about five minutes. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Tuppy wiped a fair portion of Hampshire out of his eye, and peered round him in a dazed kind of way ... -- P.g. Wodehouse
Musical comedy is the Irish stew of drama. Anything may be put into it, with the certainty that it will improve the general effect. -- P.g. Wodehouse
So always look for the silver lining And try to find the sunny side of life. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The spine, and I do not attempt to conceal the fact, had become soluble, in the last degree. -- P.g. Wodehouse
One of the rooted convictions of each member of the human race is that he or she is able without difficulty to open a door which has baffled their fellows. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He is England's premier fiend in human shape. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. His aspect was that of one who has been looking for the leak in a gas pipe with a lighted candle. -- P.g. Wodehouse
At present, he's got the idea that I'm a kind of ... Who was the chap who was such a devil with the other sex? ... Donald something."
"Donald Duck?'
"Don Juan. That's the fellow I mean -- P.g. Wodehouse
Conversationally, I am like a clockwork toy. I have to be set going. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She spoke as if she belonged to an anti-sausage society or a league for the suppression of eggs. -- P.g. Wodehouse
What you want, my lad, and what you're going to get are two very
different things. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It's an extraordinary thing - every time I see you, you appear to be recovering from some debauch. Don't you ever stop drinking? How about when you are asleep? -- P.g. Wodehouse
It go at that, I should be obtaining the reader's interest under false pretences. He was really only a sort of detective, a species of sleuth. At Stafford's International Investigation Bureau, in the Strand, where he was employed, they did not require -- P.g. Wodehouse
I started violently, as if some unseen hand had goosed me. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Presently, I was aware that Jeeves was with me. I hadn't heard him come in, but you often don't with Jeeves. He just streams silently from spot A to spot B, like some gas. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I don't know if you know it, J.B., but you're the sort of fellow who causes hundreds to fall under suspicion when he's found stabbed in his library with a paper-knife of Oriental design. -- P.g. Wodehouse
You never know what is waiting for you around the corner. You start the day with the fairest prospects, and before nightfall everything is as rocky and ding-basted as stig tossed full of doodlegammon. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Well, if he comes when I'm out, tell him to wait. And now, Jeeves, mes gants, mon chapeau, et le whangee de monsieur. I must be popping. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Nature seems to unbutton its waistcoat and put its feet up. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Has anybody ever seen a dramatic critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I suppose everyone has had that ghastly feeling at one time or another of being urged by some overwhelming force to do some absolutely blithering act. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Mac had many admirable qualities, but not tact. He was the sort of man who would have tried to cheer Napoleon up by talking about the Winter Sports at Moscow. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It went automatically to a heavy-weight mother with beetling eyebrows who looked as if she had just come from doing a spot of knitting at the foot of the guillotine. -- P.g. Wodehouse
For the last day or so there had been a certain amount of coolness in the home over a pair of jazz spats which I had dug up while exploring in the Burlington Arcade. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The voice of a donkey braying in the neighbouring meadow seemed like the mocking laughter of demons. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She has an eye like a man-eating fish -- P.g. Wodehouse
Major-General Sir Wilfred Bosher came to distribute the prizes at that school', proceeded Gussie in a dull, toneless voice.'He dropped a book. He stooped to pick it up. And, as he stooped, his trousers split up the back'.
'How we roared! -- P.g. Wodehouse
I wouldn't have a face like that,' proceeded the child, with a good deal of earnestness, 'not if you gave me a million dollars.' He thought for a moment, then corrected himself. 'Two million dollars!' he added. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I was conscious of a passing pang for the oyster world, feeling
and I think correctly
that life for these unfortunate bivalves must be one damn thing after another. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It's a funny thing about looking for things. If you hunt for a needle in a haystack you don't find it. If you don't give a darn whether you ever see the needle or not it runs into you the first time you lean against the stack. -- P.g. Wodehouse
If men's minds were like dominoes, surely his would be the double blank. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't -- P.g. Wodehouse
In his normal state he would not strike a lamb. I've known him to do it'
'Do what?'
'Not strike lambs -- P.g. Wodehouse
You can't be a successful Dictator and design women's underclothing. -- P.g. Wodehouse
A man who has spent most of his adult life trying out a series of patent medicines is always an optimist. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Hear that, Eustace? He wishes we were staying a good long time."
"I expect it will seem a good long time," said Eustace, philosophically. -- P.g. Wodehouse
We Woosters do not lightly forget. At least, we do - some things - appointments, and people's birthdays, and letters to post, and all that - but not an absolutely bally insult like the above. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I couldn't have made a better shot, if I had been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street and deduce that he is a retired manufacturer of poppet valves named Robinson with rheumatism in one arm, living at Clapham. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Blandings Castle is not for the weak. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going deep down into life and not caring a damn ... -- P.g. Wodehouse
There's a sort of wooly headed duckiness about you. If I wasn't so crazy about Marmaduke, I could really marry you Bertie. -- P.g. Wodehouse
As if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment -- P.g. Wodehouse
I started m-p-h-ing it homewards in a thrice -- P.g. Wodehouse
She gave me another of those long keen looks, and I could see that she was again asking herself if her favourite nephew wasn't steeped to the tonsils in the juice of the grape. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I could make a poet out of far less promising material. I could make a poet out of two sticks and a piece of orange peel. -- P.g. Wodehouse
To persons of spirit like ourselves the only happy marriage is that which is based on a firm foundation of almost incessant quarrelling. -- P.g. Wodehouse
If this is Upper Silesia, what on earth must Lower Silesia be like? -- P.g. Wodehouse
A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I don't know why it is, but women who have anything to do with Opera, even if they're only studying for it, always appear to run to surplus poundage. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Lady Kimbuck's eyes gleamed. She took the package eagerly. She never lost an opportunity of reading compromising letters. She enjoyed them as literature, and there was never any knowing when they might come in useful. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I don't mind people talking rot in my presence, but it must not be utter rot. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Flowers are happy things. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I've found, as a general rule of life, that the things you think are going to be the scaliest nearly always turn out not so bad after all. -- P.g. Wodehouse
A little bit added to what you've already got gives you a little bit more. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them. -- P.g. Wodehouse
These dreamer types do live, don't they? -- P.g. Wodehouse
Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled! -- P.g. Wodehouse
A detective is only human. The less of a detective, the more human he is. Henry was not much of a detective, and his human -- P.g. Wodehouse
It has never been hard to tell the difference between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine. -- P.g. Wodehouse
...Cupid, who never shoots with a surer aim than through the steam of boarding-house hash, sniped him where he sat. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I was in that painful condition which occurs when one has lost one's first wind and has not yet got one's second. -- P.g. Wodehouse
You two fit like pork and beans. -- P.g. Wodehouse
We do not tell old friends beneath our roof-tree that they are an offence to the eyesight. -- P.g. Wodehouse
What ho, Stinker.' 'Hallo, Bertie.' 'Long time since we met.' 'It is a bit, isn't it?' 'I hear you're a curate now.' 'Yes, that's right.' 'How are the souls? -- P.g. Wodehouse
What on earth are you doing in Paris?" I asked.
"Bertie, old man," said Biffy solemnly, "I came here to try and forget."
"Well, you've certainly succeeded. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Bertie, do you read Tennyson?"
"Not if I can help. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I will be your wife, Bertie.' There didn't seem much to say to this except 'Oh, thanks. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Am taking legal advice to ascertain whether strangling an idiot nephew counts as murder. If it doesn't look out for yourself. -- P.g. Wodehouse
But the unsensational doings of a quite commonplace young -- P.g. Wodehouse
The true philosopher is a man who says "All right," and goes to sleep in his armchair. -- P.g. Wodehouse
If it is bad to be all dressed up and no place to go, it is almost worse to be full of talk and to have no one to talk it to. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Deep down in his heart the genuine Englishman has a rugged distaste for seeing his country invaded by a foreign army. People were asking themselves by what right these aliens had overrun British soil. An ever-growing feeling of annoyance had begun to lay hold of the nation. -- P.g. Wodehouse
If you don't want me to attend the patient I'll go.'
'But she can't see a doctor now.'
'Why not?'
'She isn't well. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Intoxicated? The word did not express it by a mile. He was oiled, boiled, fried, plastered, whiffled, sozzled, and blotto. -- P.g. Wodehouse
More and more clearly as the scones disappeared into his interior he saw that what the sensible man wanted was a wife and a home with scones like these always at his diposal. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Just another proof, of course, of what I often say - it takes all sorts to make a world. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I shuttered from hairdo to shoe-sole -- P.g. Wodehouse
He was rigidly truthful, where the issue concerned only himself. Where it was a case of saving a friend, he was prepared to act in a manner reminiscent of an American expert witness. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Science, with a thousand triumphs to her credit, has not yet succeeded in discovering the correct reply for a young man to make who finds himself in the appalling position of being apologized to by a pretty girl. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove. -- P.g. Wodehouse
That's what I meant when I said that about the cheek of Woman as a sex. What I mean is, after what had happened, you'd have thought she would have preferred to let the dead past bury its dead, and all that sort of thing, what? -- P.g. Wodehouse
A man who can set out in a cab for a fancy-dress ball and not get there is manifestly a poop of no common order. -- P.g. Wodehouse
After all, golf is only a game,' said Millicent. Women say these things without thinking. It does not mean that there is any kink in their character. They simply don't realise what they're saying. -- P.g. Wodehouse
What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them? -- P.g. Wodehouse
And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need. -- P.g. Wodehouse
One of the drawbacks to life is that it contains moments when one is compelled to tell the truth, -- P.g. Wodehouse
If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It just showed once again that half the world doesn't know how the other three quarters live. -- P.g. Wodehouse
I killed him with my niblick, said Celia.
I nodded. If the thing was to be done at all, it was unquestionably a niblick shot. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It is fatal to let any dog know that he is funny, for he immediately loses his head and starts hamming it up. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Morning, Bill,' said Lord Tidmouth agreeably.
'Go to hell!' said Bill.
'Right-ho,' said his lordship. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Oh, I don't know, you know, don't you know? -- P.g. Wodehouse
He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It is the glorious uncertainty of golf that makes it the game it is. -- P.g. Wodehouse
All I tried to do was to give the little brute a cheerful expression. But, as it worked out, he looks positively dissipated. -- P.g. Wodehouse
The only thing that prevented a father's love from faltering was the fact that there was in his possession a photograph of himself at the same early age, in which he, too, looked like a homicidal fried egg. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Jeeves," I said, when I had washed off the stains of travel, "tell me frankly all about it. Be as frank as Lady Bablockhythe. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He sallied forth, having told all those bally lies with the clear, blue, pop-eyed gaze of a young child. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He had that indefinable air which comes to young men who have had to make their way up from a ten-dollar start. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Stimulated by the juice, I believe, men have even been known to ride alligators. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Love has had a lot of press-agenting from the oldest times; but there are higher, nobler things than love. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He had never measured a footprint in his life, and what he did not know about bloodstains would have filled a library. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Billie knew all. And, terrible though the fact is as an indictment of the male sex, when a woman knows all, there is invariably trouble ahead for some man. -- P.g. Wodehouse
He was in the frame of mind when a weaker man would have started writing poetry. -- P.g. Wodehouse
How does he look, Jeeves?"
"Sir?"
"What does Mr Bassington-Bassington look like?"
"It is hardly my place, sir, to criticize the facial peculiarities of your friends. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Her lips were tightly glued together, her chin protruding, her whole layout that of a girl who intended to stand no rannygazoo. -- P.g. Wodehouse
It isn't often that Aunt Dahlia lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them. -- P.g. Wodehouse
How did it all end?'
'Oh, I got away with my life. Still, what's life?'
'Life's all right. -- P.g. Wodehouse
Bingo swayed like a jelly in a high wind. -- P.g. Wodehouse
She was at the valiant age when we burn to right wrongs and succour the oppressed, -- P.g. Wodehouse