Quotes from P.G. Wodehouse

There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action.

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.

When you're alone you don't do much laughing.

What you want, my lad, and what you're going to get are two very different things.

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.

It was my Uncle George who discovered alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

Joan was nothing more than a friend. He was not in love with her. One does not fall in love with a girl whom one has met only three times. One is attracted, yes; but one does not fall in love. A moment's reflection enabled him to diagnose his sensations correctly. This odd impulse to leap across the compartment and kiss Joan was not love. It was merely the natural desire of a good-hearted young man to be decently chummy with his species.

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.

Providence looks after all the chumps of this world, and personally, I'm all for it.

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.

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.

Every day you seem to know less and less about more and more

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.

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.

As Shakespeare says, if you're going to do a thing you might as well pop right at it and get it over.

This Vladimir Brusiloff to whom I have referred was the famous Russian novelist. . . . Vladimir specialized in gray studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide. . . . Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must eventually give out.

And so the merry party began. It was one of those jolly, happy, bread-crumbling parties where you cough twice before you speak, and then decide not to say it after all.

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.

As a rule, you see, I'm not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across premieval swamps and Uncle James's letter about Cousin Mabel's peculiar behaviour is being shot round the family circle ('Please read this carefully and send it on Jane') the clan has a tendency to ignore me. It's one of the advantages I get from being a bachelor - and, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that.

The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.

It was a silver cow. But when I say 'cow', don't go running away with the idea of some decent, self-respecting cudster such as you may observe loading grass into itself in the nearest meadow. This was a sinister, leering, Underworld sort of animal, the kind that would spit out of the side of its mouth for twopence.

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.

Beginning with a critique of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum.

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.