Quotes from P.G. Wodehouse

You could tell it was classical, because the banjo players were leaning back and chewing gum; and in New York restaurants only death or a classical speciality can stop banjoists.

It is in the spring that the ache for the larger life comes on us, and this was a particularly mellow spring morning.

The breakfasts—included in the rent—provided by Mrs. Bell, the landlady of Number Seven, were held by some authorities to be specially designed to quell the spirits of their victims, should they tend to soar excessively.

There were nights in the hot weather when Mike would be despondent. A New York summer night does not encourage optimism.

It was a generously-planned face. Nature seemed to have started out with the idea of making two faces and then to have decided to use all the material for one.

Like most people who have made a defiant and dramatic gesture and then have leisure to reflect, he was oppressed by a feeling that he had gone considerably farther than was prudent. Samson, as he heard the pillars of the temple begin to crack, must have felt the same. Gestures are all very well while the intoxication lasts. The trouble is that it lasts such a very little while.

He alluded in feeling terms to the Providence which watches over good young men and saves them from the blighting necessity of offering themselves in the flower of their golden youth as human sacrifices to the Moloch of capitalistic greed: and, having commiserated with his guests in that a similar stroke of luck had not happened to each of them, advised them to drown their sorrows in drink.

He was a long, slender youth, with green eyes, jet-black hair, and a passionate fondness for the sound of his own voice.

He paused, and stole a glance at his wife. It was as he had feared. She had congealed. Like some spell, the name Jackson had apparently turned her to marble. It was like the Pygmalion and Galatea business working the wrong way round. She was presumably breathing, but there was no sign of it.

Don't do it. Women are the devil, whether they marry you or jilt you. Do you realise that women wear black evening dresses that have to be hooked up in a hurry when you are late for the theatre, and that, out of sheer wanton malignity, the hooks and eyes on those dresses are also made black? Do you realise...?

Below him, the woolly dog raged like the ocean at the base of a cliff.

I sank into a c. and passed an agitated h. over the b.

It seems incredible that we haven't met before. If you ask most people, they will tell you the difficult thing is to avoid meeting me.

Oily started, and a hot flush suffused his forehead. His professional pride was piqued. In no section of the community are class distinctions more rigid than among those who make a dishonest living by crime. The burglar looks down on the stick-up man, the stick-up man on the humbler practitioner who steals milk cans. Accuse a high-up confidence artist of petty larceny, and you bring out all the snob in him.

What a gruesome mess you must have been at three,' said the Biscuit meditatively. 'You were bad enough at fourteen. At three you must have made strong men shudder.

The Problem of Life seemed to him to be solved. He looked on down the years, and he could see no troubles there of any kind whatsoever. Reason suggested that there were probably one or two knocking about somewhere, but this was no time to think of them. He examined the future, and found it good.

I am listening, I tell you. Get to the point. And talk quick, darn it. Remember it's costing forty-five bucks every three minutes.' For Mrs Moon was speaking from her apartment on Park Avenue, New York. And though it was the woman who would pay, waste even of other people's money was agony to Mr Frisby. He possessed twenty million dollars himself, and loved every cent of them.

I say, you know', said Dudley, awkwardly, 'if I'm in the way, you know, just speak the word and I'll race off to the local pub. I mean to say, don't want to butt in, I mean.' 'Not at all, Mr--' 'Finch.' 'Not at all, Mr. Finch. I am only too delighted', said Lady Wickham, looking at him as if he were a particularly loathsome slug which had interrupted some beautiful reverie of hers in the rose-garden, 'that you were able to come.

Mr. Crocker was swallowing convulsively, as if testing his larynx with a view to speech. Like Saul of Tarsus, he had been stricken dumb by the sudden bright light which his wife's words had caused to flash upon him.

Bertie : [on Gussie] Any message for him? Roderick Spode - 8th Earl of Sidcup: Yes. Tell him I'm going to break his neck. Bertie : Break his neck, right. And, if he should ask why? Roderick Spode - 8th Earl of Sidcup : He knows why. Because he is a butterfly, who toys with women's hearts and throws them away like soiled gloves! Bertie : Do butterflies do that? Roderick Spode - 8th Earl of Sidcup : Are you trying to be funny?

It is possible, too, that, being there, you decided that you might as well go the whole hog and be manicured at the same time. It is not unlikely, moreover, that when you had got over the first shock of finding your hands so unexpectedly large and red, you felt disposed to chat with the young lady who looked after that branch of the business.

Work, the what's-its-name of the thingummy and the thing-um-a-bob of the what d'you-call-it

perceived the numbing truth that we human beings are merely as many pieces in a jig-saw puzzle and that our every movement affects the fortunes of some other piece. Just so, faintly at first and taking shape by degrees, must the germ of civic spirit have come to Prehistoric Man. We are all individualists till we wake up.

Come in!' cried the voice, rather a pleasant voice; but what is a pleasant voice if the soul be vile?