Quotes from P.G. Wodehouse

She was oppressed by the eternal melancholy miracle of the fat man who does not realize that he has become fat.

He knitted a good deal, he would tell you if you asked him, to keep himself from smoking, adding that he also smoked a good deal to keep himself from knitting.

The motto of the Little family was evidently variety. Young Bingo is long and thin and hasn't had a superfluous ounce on him since we first met; but the uncle restored the average and a bit over. The hand which grasped mine wrapped it round and enfolded it till I began to wonder if I'd ever get it out without excavating machinery.

Had I been alone, a casual glance in passing would have contented me, but for Ukridge the spectacle of somebody else working always had an irresistible fascination, and, gripping my arm, he steered me up to assist him in giving the toiler moral support. About two minutes after he had started to breathe earnestly on the man's neck, the latter, seeming to become aware that what was tickling his back hair was not some wandering June zephyr, looked up with a certain petulance.

But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is. Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.

Once, soon after his arrival in London, he had allowed a dangerous fanatic to persuade him that the secret of health was to go without breakfast.

We're all alike when we get bustled. We don't know what we're doing, and by the time we've put our hands up and got into shape, why, it's all over, and there you are. Don't you worry yourself, sir.

Life, said Wesson, who had had time for reflection, is a house which we all burgle. We enter it uninvited, take all that we can lay hands on, and go out again.

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.

Besides, a burglar is only a practical socialist. Philosophers talk a lot about the redistribution of wealth. The burglar goes out and does it.

It was a dashed tricky thing, of course, to have to decide on the spur of the moment. I was reading in the paper the other day about those birds who are trying to split the atom, the nub being that they haven't the foggiest as to what will happen if they do. It may be all right.

Joss raised his eyebrows. 'My dear J.B., when you madly dispensed with my services, you surely did not expect that a man of my gifts would be out of employment long? I was snapped up immediately. I have a sort of general commission to look after things here. You might call me the Claines Hall Fuhrer.' 'Steptoe said you were his valet.' 'Yes, that's another way of putting it.

he switched on the [flashlight]. When he did so, he instantly became the center attraction to a rowdy mob of those gnats, moths, and beetles which collect in gangs and stay up late in the rural districts. They appeared to have been waiting for a congenial comrade to come along and give a fillip to their nocturnal revels and nothing could have been more hearty than the welcome they gave him. He was swallowing his sixth gnat when...

It is a curious law of Nature that the most undeserving brothers always have the best sisters.

Indeed, there is always something very restful about a duck. Whatever earthquakes and upheavals may be afflicting the general public, it stands aloof from them and just goes on being a duck.

It was as if Dante had recommended some lost soul in the Inferno to occupy his mind by knitting jumpers.

One of the many things Mike could never understand in Psmith was his fondness for getting into atmospheres that were not his own. He would go out of his way to do this. Mike, like most boys of his age, was never really happy and at his ease except in the presence of those of his own years and class. Psmith, on the contrary, seemed to be bored by them, and infinitely preferred talking to somebody who lived in quite another world.

It would have pained the immaculate Monty, could he have known that his prospective employer was picturing him at the moment as furtive, shifty-eyed, rat-like person of the gangster, type, liable at the first opportunity to sneak into the sties of innocent pigs and plant pineapple bombs in their bran-mash.

To say that the farmer laughed would be to express the matter feebly. That his young opponent, who had been irritating him unspeakably since the beginning of the game with advice and criticism, should have done exactly what he had cautioned him, the farmer, against a moment before, struck him as being the finest example of poetic justice he had ever heard of, and he signalized his appreciation of the same by nearly dying of apoplexy.

There are few things more restful than to watch some one else busy under a warm sun.

They have undoubtedly come to a bad end by this time. If bears were sent to attend to the children who criticised Elijah, your little friends were in line for a troupe of tigers. But there were some of a finer fibre? There were a few who didn't call you Carrots?

He was conscious of a wish that he understood girls. Girls, in his opinion, were odd.

No Adonis to begin with, he had been so edited and re-edited during a long and prosperous ring career by the gloved fists of a hundred foes that in affairs of the heart he was obliged to rely exclusively on moral worth and charm of manner.

Celestine had been born Maggie O'Toole, a name which Mrs. Pett stoutly refused to countenance in any maid of hers.