Quotes from P.G. Wodehouse

The door opened and Oakes entered tensely. He did everything tensely, partly from a natural nervous energy, and partly as a pose.

Anyone who has had anything to do with the higher diplomacy is aware that diplomatic language stands in a class by itself. It is a language specially designed to deceive the chance listener.

Spode, also, seemed a good deal

the hand that counteth its chickens ere they be hatched oft-times doth but step on the banana-skin.

jezail-bullets.

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.

Most of the Underhills came into the world looking as though they meant to drive their way through life like a wedge.

Shakespeare describes the poet's eye as rolling in a fine frenzy from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, but in practice you will find that one corner of that eye is generally glued on the royalty returns.

Scrubby, impecunious men drift to and fro there, waiting for the gods to provide something easy; and the prudent man, conscious of the possession of loose change, whizzes through the danger zone at his best speed, 'like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread, and having once turned round walks on, and turns no more his head, because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread.

I ate cheese gravely.

The antique shop in the Brompton Road proved, as fore-shadowed, to be an antique shop in the Brompton Road and, like all antique shops except the swanky ones in the Bond Street neigbourhood, dingy outside and dark and smelly within. I don't know why it is, but the proprietors of these establishments always seem to be cooking some sort of stew in the back room.

Pat, you're absurd, laughed Lady Jane. I won't have you littering up the house with great, clumsy detectives. You must remember that you aren't in horrid New York now, where everybody you meet wants to rob you. Who is it that you suspect? Who is the—what is the word you're so fond of? Crook. That's it. Who is the crook?

The question of the rightness or wrongness of Potts appeared to be one on which he was loth to set himself up as an authority.

As Nebuchadnezzar is reported to have said of his vegetarian diet, it may have been wholesome, but it was not good.

I see. Before you fell a victim to the feverish desire for reckless speculation which is so marked a characteristic of the American business man, what?

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." "What I want—Jeeves, have you seen that play called I-forget-its-dashed-name?

Because I have already attended to the matter, sir." "What?" "Yes, sir. I decided, after all, to acquiesce in your wishes." I stared at the man, astounded. I was deeply moved. Well, I mean, wouldn't any chap who had been going about thinking that the old feudal spirit was dead and then suddenly found it wasn't have been deeply moved? "Jeeves," I said, "I am touched.

XVIII. THE LOCHINVAR METHOD XIX. ON THE LAKE XX. A LESSON IN PICQUET

He was abstaining from too close an examination of his emotions from a prudent feeling that he was going to suffer soon enough without assistance from himself.

Conscia mens recti, nec si sinit esse dolorem Sed revocare gradum.

Nobody is at his best in the matter of explanations if a lady whom he knows to be possessed of a firm belief in the incurable weakness of his intellect is looking fixedly at him during the recital.

The gods are business-like. They sell; they do not give. And for what they sell they demand a heavy price. We may buy life of them in many ways; with our honour, our health, our independence, our happiness; with our brains or with our hands. But somehow or other, in whatever currency we may choose to pay it, the price must be paid.

The stoppered bottle does not care whose is the hand that removes its cork – all it wants is the chance to fizz:

Mrs. Pett, like most other people, subconsciously held the view that the ruder a person is the more efficient he must be. It is but rarely that any one is found who is not dazzled by the glamour of incivility.