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P G Wodehouse once wrote, " I believe there are two ways of writing novels.

One is mine,
making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is
going right deep down into life and not caring a damn."

And this attitude of "not caring a damn" gave rise to one of the richest treasure-troves of
funny and wonderful quotes and lines in English language. Some of these are listed below. A
word of caution - please read it alone so as not to disturb people around you with your
laughter and guffaw.

The Man Upstairs (1914)

 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.

Something Fresh (1915)

 The village of Market Blandings is one of those sleepy hamlets which modern progress
has failed to touch... The church is Norman, and the intelligence of the majority of the
natives palaeozoic.

The Man with Two Left Feet (1917)

 At five minutes to eleven on the morning named he was at the station, a false beard and
spectacles shielding his identity from the public eye. If you had asked him he would have
said that he was a Scotch business man. As a matter a fact, he looked far more like a
motor-car coming through a haystack.

 ‘As a sleuth you are poor. You couldn’t detect a bass-drum in a telephone-booth.’

 Henry glanced hastily at the mirror. Yes, he did look rather old. He must have overdone
some of the lines on his forehead. He looked something between a youngish centenarian
and a nonagenarian who had seen a good deal of trouble.

 There are some things a chappie's mind absolutely refuses to picture, and Aunt Julia
singing 'Rumpty-tiddley-umpty-ay' is one of them.

Piccadilly Jim (1918)

 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 backyard bears itself with less jauntiness than a man
faced by such a prospect.

The Adventures of Sally (1922)

 And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you
will need.

 The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the
right or wrong end of the gun.

 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.
 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.

 At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle
difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later
seventies.

 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.

 Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after
dark, up to no good.

 He trusted neither of them as far as he could spit, and he was a poor spitter, lacking both
distance and control.

 It was one of those cold, clammy, accusing sort of eyes--the kind that makes you reach
up to see if your tie is straight: and he looked at me as I were some sort of unnecessary
product which Cuthbert the Cat had brought in after a ramble among the local ash-cans.

 It was a cold, disapproving gaze, such as a fastidious luncher who was not fond of
caterpillars might have directed at one which he had discovered in his portion of salad...
 “Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his
forehead first, and if it rings solid, don't hesitate.”

The Girl on the Boat (1922)

 Dark hair fell in a sweep over his forehead. He looked like a man who would write vers
libre, as indeed he did.

The Clicking Of Cuthbert (1922)

 He was not a man who prattled readily, especially in a foreign tongue. He gave the
impression that each word was excavated from his interior by some up-to-date process of
mining.

The Inimitable Jeeves (1923)

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

 I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking
daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.

 Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a
caterpillar out of his salad.

 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.

 Anybody can talk me round. If I were in a Trappist monastery, the first thing that would
happen would be that some smooth performer would lure me into some frightful idiocy
against my better judgment by means of the deaf-and-dumb language.
Ukridge (1924)

 ‘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 ear with a red-hot needle.’

 Whenever I meet Ukridge’s Aunt Julia I have the same curious illusion of having just
committed some particularly unsavoury crime and—what is more—of having done it with
swollen hands, enlarged feet, and trousers bagging at the knee on a morning when I had
omitted to shave.

 He resembled a minor prophet who had been hit behind the ear with a stuffed eel-skin.

 He committed mayhem upon his person. He did everything to him that a man can do
who is hampered with boxing gloves.

Carry On, Jeeves (1925)

 'Yes, sir,' said Jeeves in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a
personal friend.

 Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a
welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly
thing to face over the breakfast table. Brainy, moreover.

The Heart of a Goof (1926)

 Dedication: To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and


encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.

 While they were content to peck cautiously at the ball, he never spared himself in his
efforts to do it a violent injury.

 Blizzard was of the fine old school of butlers. His appearance suggested that for fifteen
years he had not let a day pass without its pint of port. He radiated port and pop-eyed
dignity. He had splay feet and three chins, and when he walked his curving waistcoat
preceded him like the advance guard of some royal procession.

 Bradbury Fisher shuddered from head to foot, and his legs wobbled like asparagus stalks.

Mr Mulliner Speaking (1929)

 [of a character in "The Man Who Gave Up Smoking" who is suffering from a hangover] ...
the noise of the cat stamping about in the passage outside caused him exquisite
discomfort.

Summer Lightning (1929)

 A certain critic—for such men, I regret to say, do exist—made the nasty remark about my
last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’. He
has probably now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet
Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against
Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled this man by
putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will
make him feel, I rather fancy. (From preface)

 At this moment, the laurel bush, which had hitherto not spoken, said "Psst!"

 This done, he felt a little—not much, but a little—better. Before, he would have gladly
murdered Beach and James and danced on their graves. Now, he would have been
satisfied with straight murder.

Very Good, Jeeves (1930)

 The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his
clothes and had forgotten to say `When!'

 My Aunt Dahlia has a carrying voice... If all other sources of income failed, she could
make a good living calling the cattle home across the Sands of Dee.

 She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who
knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season.

 Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove.

 In one second, without any previous training or upbringing, he had become the wettest
man in Worcestershire.

Big Money (1931)

 I can't stand Paris. I hate the place. Full of people talking French, which is a thing I bar.
It always seems to me so affected.

 He groaned slightly and winced, like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for
lunch.

Thank You, Jeeves (1934)

 ’Oh, yes, he thinks a lot of you. I remember his very words. 'Mr Wooster, miss' he said
'is, perhaps, mentally somewhat negligible but he has a heart of gold’

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

 "You will agree with me that he is not everybody's money."

 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.

 Scarcely had I entered the sitting-room when I found ... what appeared at first sight to
be the Devil, A closer scrutiny informed me that it was Gussie Fink-Nottle, dressed as
Mephistopheles.

 We do not tell old friends beneath our roof-tree that they are an offence to the eyesight.

 Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.

 The female in question was a sloppy pest


 There is enough sadness in life without having fellows like Gussie Fink-Nottle going about
in sea boots.

 A slight throbbing about the temples told me that this discussion had reached saturation
point.

 I consider that of all the dashed silly, drivelling ideas I ever heard in my puff this is the
most blithering and futile. It won't work. Not a chance.

 And a moment later there was a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and the relative had
crossed the threshold at fifty m.p.h. under her own steam.

 My Aunt Agatha, the curse of the Home Counties and a menace to one and all.

 she cried in a voice that hit me between the eyebrows and went out at the back of my
head.

 "Have you ever heard of Market Snodsbury Grammar School?"

"Never."
"It's a grammar school at Market Snodsbury."
I told her a little frigidly that I had divined as much.

 I goggled. Her words did not appear to make sense. They seemed the mere aimless
vapouring of an aunt who has been sitting out in the sun without a hat.

 "You're pulling my leg."

"I am not pulling your leg. Nothing would induce me to touch your beastly leg."

 He had been looking like a dead fish. He now looked like a deader fish, one of last year's,
cast up on some lonely beach and left there at the mercy of the wind and tides.

 It's only about once in a lifetime that anything sensational ever happens to one, and
when it does, you don't want people taking all the colour out of it. I remember at school
having to read that stuff where that chap, Othello, tells the girl what a hell of a time he'd
been having among the cannibals and what not. Well, imagine his feelings if, after he had
described some particularly sticky passage with a cannibal chief and was waiting for the
awestruck "Oh-h! Not really?", she had said that the whole thing had no doubt been
greatly exaggerated and that the man had probably really been a prominent local
vegetarian.

"It's the sort of thing you would do."


"My scheme is far more subtle. Let me outline it for you."
"No, thanks."
"I say to myself----"
"But not to me."
"Do listen for a second."
"I won't."
"Right ho, then. I am dumb."
"And have been from a child."

 "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. "

 In build and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog, and his aspect now was
that of one of these fine animals who has just been refused a slice of cake.
 The discovery of a toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former
juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with
one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found
the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may
mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go,
it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn. Ten
minutes of this and I was enabled to return to the bedchamber much more the old merry
Bertram.

 "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?' Like the latter, it seems to be tinged with a definite
scepticism. It suggests a lack of faith in my vision. The impression I retain after hearing
you shoot it at me a couple of times is that you consider me to be talking through the
back of my neck, and that only a feudal sense of what is fitting restrains you from
substituting for it the words 'Says you!'"

"Oh? I didn't know that."


"There isn't much you do know."

"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."
"Quite."
"Any tutting that's required, I'll attend to myself. And the same applies to clicking the
tongue, if you were thinking of doing that."
"Far from it."
"Good."

 And as for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been
deceived by his appearance and started embalming him on sight.

 I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts about a fellow
named Pig-something--a sculptor he would have been, no doubt--who made a statue of a
girl, and what should happen one morning but that the bally thing suddenly came to life.
A pretty nasty shock for the chap, of course.

 "Oh, look," she said. She was a confirmed Oh-looker. I had noticed this at Cannes, where
she had drawn my attention in this manner on various occasions to such diverse objects
as a French actress, a Provençal filling station, the sunset over the Estorels, Michael
Arlen, a man selling coloured spectacles, the deep velvet blue of the Mediterranean, and
the late mayor of New York in a striped one-piece bathing suit.

 When I was a child, I used to think that rabbits were gnomes, and that if I held my
breath and stayed quite still, I should see the fairy queen.". Indicating with a reserved
gesture that this was just the sort of loony thing I should have expected her to think as a
child, I returned to the point.

 Though never for an instant faltering in my opinion that Augustus Fink-Nottle was
Nature's final word in cloth-headed guffins, I liked the man, wished him well.

 Then he rose and began to pace the room in an overwrought sort of way, like a zoo lion
who has heard the dinner-gong go and is hoping the keeper won't forget him in the
general distribution.

 Contenting myself, accordingly, with a gesture of loving sympathy, I left the room.
Whether she did or did not throw a handsomely bound volume of the Works of Alfred,
Lord Tennyson, at me, I am not in a position to say. I had seen it lying on the table
beside her, and as I closed the door I remember receiving the impression that some
blunt instrument had crashed against the woodwork, but I was feeling too pre-occupied
to note and observe.

"Goodbye, Bertie," he said, rising.


I seemed to spot an error.
"You mean 'Hullo,' don't you?"
"No, I don't. I mean goodbye. I'm off."
"Off where?"
"To the kitchen garden. To drown myself."
"Don't be an ass."
"I'm not an ass.... Am I an ass, Jeeves?"
"Possibly a little injudicious, sir."
"Drowning myself, you mean?"
"Yes, sir."
"You think, on the whole, not drown myself?"
"I should not advocate it, sir."
"Very well, Jeeves. I accept your ruling. After all, it would be unpleasant for Mrs. Travers
to find a swollen body floating in her pond."

 "Jeeves," I said, and I am free to admit that in my emotion I bleated like a lamb drawing
itself to the attention of the parent sheep, "what the dickens is all this?"

 I wouldn't have said off-hand that I had a subconscious mind, but I suppose I must
without knowing it, and no doubt it was there, sweating away diligently at the old stand,
all the while the corporeal Wooster was getting his eight hours.

 If you can visualize a bulldog which has just been kicked in the ribs and had its dinner
sneaked by the cat, you will have Hildebrand Glossop as he now stood before me.

"I've been through hell, Bertie."


"Through where?"
"Hell."
"Oh, hell? And what took you there?"

 "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."

 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. On the other hand, it may not be all right. And pretty silly a chap would
feel, no doubt, if, having split the atom, he suddenly found the house going up in smoke
and himself torn limb from limb.

 He expressed the opinion that the world was in a deplorable state. I said, 'Don't talk rot,
old Tom Travers.' 'I am not accustomed to talk rot,' he said. 'Then, for a beginner,' I said,
'you do it dashed well.' And I think you will admit, boys and ladies and gentlemen, that
that was telling him."

 "The fellow with a face rather like a walnut."

 Nature, when planning this sterling fellow, shoved in a lot more lower jaw than was
absolutely necessary and made the eyes a bit too keen and piercing for one who was
neither an Empire builder nor a traffic policeman.
 "She loves this newt-nuzzling blister."

 "I hadn't heard the door open, but the man was on the spot once more. My private
belief, as I think I have mentioned before, is that Jeeves doesn't have to open doors.
He's like one of those birds in India who bung their astral bodies about--the chaps, I
mean, who having gone into thin air in Bombay, reassemble the parts and appear two
minutes later in Calcutta. Only some such theory will account for the fact that he's not
there one moment and is there the next. He just seems to float from Spot A to Spot B
like some form of gas.

 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.

 Even at normal times Aunt Dahlia's map tended a little towards the crushed strawberry.
But never had I seen it take on so pronounced a richness as now. She looked like a
tomato struggling for self-expression.

 If the prophet Job were to walk into the room at this moment, I could sit swapping hard-
luck stories with him till bedtime."

 I charged into something which might have been a tree, but was not--being, in point of
fact, Jeeves.

 There is about him something that seems to soothe and hypnotize. To the best of my
knowledge, he has never encountered a charging rhinoceros, but should this contingency
occur, I have no doubt that the animal, meeting his eye, would check itself in mid-stride,
roll over and lie purring with its legs in the air.

Blandings Castle (1935)

 It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of


sunshine.

 A sort of gulpy, gurgly, plobby, squishy, wofflesome sound, like a thousand eager men
drinking soup in a foreign restaurant.

The Luck of the Bodkins (1935)

 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 talk French. One of the things which Gertrude Butterwick had
impressed on Monty Bodkin when he left for his holiday on the Riviera was that he must
be sure to practise his French, and Gertrude’s word was law. So now, though he knew
that it was going to make his nose tickle, he said:
‘Er, garçon.’
‘M’sieur?’
‘Er, garçon, esker-vous avez un spot de l’encre et une piece de papier—note papier, vous
savez—et une envelope et une plume.’
The strain was too great. Monty relapsed into his native tongue.
‘I want to write a letter,’ he said. And having, like all lovers, rather a tendency to share
his romance with the world, he would probably have aded ‘to the sweetest girl on earth’ ,
had not the waiter already bounded off like a retriever, to return a few moments later
with the fixings.
‘V’la, sir! Zere you are, sir,’ said the waiter. He was engaged to a girl in Paris who had
told him that when on the Riviera he must be sure to practise his English. ‘Eenk—pin—
pipper—enveloppe—and a liddle bit of bloddin-pipper.’
‘Oh, merci,’ said Monty, well pleased at this efficiency. ‘Thanks. Right-ho.’
‘Right-ho, m’sieur,’ said the waiter.

 A young man with dark circles under his eyes was propping himself up against a penny-
in-the-slot machine. An undertaker, passing at that moment, would have looked at this
young man sharply, scenting business. So would a buzzard.

Laughing Gas (1936)

 'Didn't Frankenstein get married?'


'Did he?' said Eggy. 'I don't know. I never met him. Harrow man, I expect.'

 If Eggy wanted to get spliced, let him, was the way I looked at it. Marriage might
improve him. It was difficult to think of anything that wouldn’t.

 I shuddered from stem to stern, as stout barks do when buffeted by the waves.

 It was a harsh, rasping voice, in its timbre not unlike a sawmill.

Young Men in Spats (1936)

 ‘Do you know,’ said a thoughtful Bean, ‘I’ll bet that if all the girls Freddie Widgeon has
loved were placed end to end—not that I suppose one could do it—they would reach
half-way down Piccadilly.’
‘Further than that,’ said the Egg. ‘Some of them were pretty tall.’

 ’You must remember, Father,’ said Mavis, in a voice which would have had an Eskimo
slapping his ribs and calling for the steam-heat, ‘that this girl was probably very pretty.
So many of these New York girls are. That would, of course, explain Frederick's
behaviour.’

 He then gave a hideous laugh and added that, if anybody was interested in his plans, he
was going to join the Foreign Legion, that cohort of the damned in which broken men
may toil and die and dying, forget. ‘Beau Widgeon?’ said the Egg, impressed. ‘What ho!’

Lord Emsworth and Others (1937)

 ‘Oh Brancepeth,’ said the girl, her voice trembling, ‘why haven’t you any money? If only
you had the merest pittance - enough for a flat in Mayfair and a little weekend place in
the country somewhere and a couple of good cars and a villa in the South of France and
a bit of trout fishing on some decent river, I would risk all for love.’

The Code of the Woosters (1938)

 I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

 Aunt Agatha, who eats broken bottles and wears barbed wire next to the skin.

 [of Spode] He was, as I had already been able to perceive, a breath-taking cove. About
seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet
across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a
gorilla and had changed its mind at the last moment.

 It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike.
Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.
 'Have you ever seen Spode eat asparagus?'
'No.'
'Revolting. It alters one's whole conception of Man as Nature's last word.'

 Prismatic is the only word for those frightful tweeds and, oddly enough, the spectacle of
them had the effect of steadying my nerves. They gave me the feeling that nothing
mattered.

 The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a
handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you
think you're someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the
Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People
is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever
in your puff see such a perfect perisher?

 'There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, "Do trousers matter?"'
‘The mood will pass, sir.’

 Stiffy was one of those girls who enjoy in equal quantities the gall of an army mule and
the calm insouciance of a fish on a slab of ice.

 There came from without the hoof-beats of a galloping relative and Aunt Dahlia whizzed
in.

 'You can't be a successful Dictator and design women's underclothing.'


'No, sir.'
'One or the other. Not both.'
'Precisely, sir.'

 ’You know your Shelley, Bertie!’


‘Oh, am I?’

 I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but a thing I have found in life is that
from time to time, as you jog along, there occur moments which you are able to
recognize immediately with the naked eye as high spots. Something tells you that they
are going to remain etched, if etched is the word I want, for ever on the memory and will
come back to you at intervals down the years, as you are dropping off to sleep, banishing
that drowsy feeling and causing you to leap on the pillow like a gaffed salmon.

 'I want to know what the devil you mean by keeping coming into my private apartment,
taking up space which I require for other purposes and interrupting me when I am
chatting with my personal friends. Really one gets about as much privacy in this house as
a strip-tease dancer.'

 "Oh Bertie," she said in a low voice like beer trickling out of a jug, "you ought not to be
here!".

Summer Moonshine (1938)

 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.

 Directing an austere look at Tubby’s receding back, she spoke in a cold crisp voice which
sounded in the drowsy stillness like ice tinkling in a pitcher.
 Whatever may be said in favour of the Victorians, it is pretty generally admitted that few
of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.

Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939)

 'Don't blame me, Pongo,' said Lord Ickenham, 'if Lady Constance takes her lorgnette to
you. God bless my soul, though, you can't compare the lorgnettes of today with the ones
I used to know as a boy. I remember walking one day on Grosvenor Square with my aunt
Brenda and her pug dog Jabberwocky, and a policeman came up and said the latter
ought to be wearing a muzzle. My aunt made no verbal reply. She merely whipped her
lorgnette from its holder and looked at the man, who gave one choking gasp and fell
back against the railings, starting eyes as if he had seen some dreadful sight. A doctor
was sent for, and they managed to bring him round, but he was never the same again.
He had to leave the Force, and eventually drifted into the grocery business. And that is
how Sir Thomas Lipton got his start.'

 It began to be borne in upon Lord Ickenham that in planning to appeal to the Duke’s
better feelings he had omitted to take into his calculations the fact that he might not
have any.

 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.

Eggs, Beans and Crumpets (1940)

 He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite
him in the leg.

 Bingo swayed like a jelly in a high wind.

 His whole aspect was that of a man who has unexpectedly been struck by lightning.

Joy in the Morning (1947)

 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.

 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.

 I suppose this was really the moment for embarking upon an impassioned defence of
Boko, stressing his admirable qualities. Not being able to think of any, however, I
remained silent.

 On his good mornings, I don't suppose there are more than a handful of men in the W. 1
postal district of London swifter to spot oompus-boompus than Bertram Wooster, and this
was one of my particularly good mornings. I saw the whole hideous plot.

 I don’t say I’ve got much of a soul, but, such as it is, I’m perfectly satisfied with the little
chap. I don’t want people fooling about with it. ‘Leave it alone,’ I say. ‘Don’t touch it. I
like it the way it is.’

 He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into mud.

 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.
 She laughed - a solo effort. Nothing in the prevailing circumstances made me feel like
turning it into a duet.

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

 We exchanged a meaning glance. Or, rather, two meaning glances, I giving him one and
he giving me the other.

 When news had reached me through well-informed channels that my Aunt Agatha for
many years a widow, or derelict, as I believed it is called, was about to take another pop
at matrimony, my first emotion, as was natural in the circumstances, had been a gentle
pity for the unfortunate goop slated to step up the aisle with her - she, as you are aware,
being my tough aunt, the one who eats broken bottles and conducts human sacrifices by
the light of the full moon.

Spring Fever (1948)

 Breakfast had been prepared by the kitchen maid, an indifferent performer who had used
the scorched earth policy on the bacon again.

Uncle Dynamite (1948)

 The stationmaster’s whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of
having been grown under glass.

The Mating Season (1949)

 On the cue 'five aunts' I had given at the knees a trifle, for the thought of being
confronted with such a solid gaggle of aunts, even if those of another, was an unnerving
one. Reminding myself that in this life it is not aunts that matter, but the courage that
one brings to them, I pulled myself together.

 As far as the eye could reach, I found myself gazing on a surging sea of aunts. There
were tall aunts, short aunts, stout aunts, thin aunts, and an aunt who was carrying on a
conversation in a low voice to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention.

Pigs Have Wings (1952)

 For an author Jerry Vail was rather nice-looking, most authors, as is widely known,
resembling in appearance the more degraded types of fish, unless they look like birds,
when they could pass as vultures and no questions asked.

 The junior partner of Caine and Cooper, though a man of blameless life, had one of those
dark, saturnine faces which suggest a taste for the more sinister forms of crime, and on
one cheek of that dark, saturnine face was a long scar. Actually it had been caused by
the bursting of a gingerbeer bottle at a Y.M.C.A. picnic, but it gave the impression of
being the outcome of battles with knives in the cellars of the underworld.

 Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes.

 For some moments after silence had come like a poultice to heal the blows of sound, all
that occupied his mind was the thought of what pests the gentler sex were when they
got hold of a telephone. The instrument seemed to go to their heads like a drug. Connie
Keeble, for instance. Nice sensible woman when you talked to her face to face, never
tried to collar the conversation and all that, but the moment she got on the telephone, it
was gab, gab, gab, and all about nothing.

Ring for Jeeves (1953)

 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.

Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit (1954)

 I agreed the situation was sticky. Indeed, offhand it was difficult to see how it could have
been more glutinous.

 As plainly as if it had been the top line on the oculist’s chart I could see what the future
held for Bertram.

 Before my eyes he wilted like a wet sock.

 And as he, too, seemed disinclined for chit-chat, we stood for some moments like a
couple of Trappist monks who have run into each other at the dog races.

Cocktail Time (1958)

 Nannie Bruce, a tall, gangling light-heavyweight with a suggestion in her appearance of a


private in the Grenadiers dressed up to play the title role in Charley’s Aunt, was one of
those doggedly faithful retainers who adhere to almost all old families like barnacles to
the hulls of ships...She was as much a fixture as the stone lions or the funny smell in the
attic.

 He had that self-reproachful feeling of having been remiss which comes to Generals who
wake up one morning to discover that they have carelessly allowed themselves to be
outflanked.

 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.

A Few Quick Ones (1959)

 Attila the Hun might have broken off his engagement to her, but nobody except Attila the
Hun, and he only on one of his best mornings.

Jeeves in the Offing (1960)

 ...I mean to say, when a girl, offered a good man’s heart, laughs like a bursting paper
bag and tells him not to be a silly ass, the good man is entitled, I think, to assume that
the whole thing is off.

 Whenever there is a job to be taken on of a kind calculated to make Humanity shudder,


the cry goes up, ‘Let Wooster do it.’

 ‘Are you sure?’ I said that sure was just what I wasn’t anything but.
 She’s all for not letting the sun go down without having started something calculated to
stagger humanity.

 ‘Suppose your Aunt Dahlia read in the paper one morning that you were going to be shot
at sunrise.’
‘I couldn’t be, I’m never up so early.’

 ‘When I say “mind,”’ said the blood relation, ‘I refer to the quarter-teaspoonful of brain
which you might possibly find in her head if you sank an artesian well.’

 I started violently, as if some unseen hand had goosed me.

 I’d always thought her half-baked, but now I think they didn’t even put her in the oven.

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (1963)

 ‘Don't you like this hat?‘


‘No, sir.‘
‘Well, I do,‘ I replied rather cleverly, and went out with it tilted just that merest shade
over the left eye which makes all the difference.

 He’s engaged to be married to Stiffy Byng, and his long years of football should prove an
excellent preparation for setting up house with her. The way I look at it is that when a
fellow has had plug-uglies in cleated boots doing a Shuffle-off-to-Buffalo on his face
Saturday after Saturday since he was a slip of a boy, he must get to fear nothing, not
even marriage with a girl like Stiffy, who from early childhood has seldom let the sun go
down without starting some loony enterprise calculated to bleach the hair of one and all.

 ‘Stinko, is he?’
'Not perhaps stinko, but certainly effervescent.’

 'I hate you, I hate you!' cried Madeline, a thing I didn't know anyone ever said except in
the second act of a musical comedy.

 ...as I felt my way along the wall I collided with what turned out to be a grandfather
clock, for the existence of which I had not budgeted, and it toppled over with a sound
like the delivery of several tons of coal through the roof of a conservatory. Glass crashed,
pulleys and things parted from their moorings, and as I stood trying to separate my heart
from the front teeth in which it had become entangled, the lights flashed on and I beheld
Sir Watkyn Bassett.

 I was expecting Pop Bassett to give an impersonation of a bomb falling on an


ammunition dump, but he didn’t. Instead, he continued to exhibit that sort of chilly
stiffness which you see in magistrates when they’re fining people five quid for boyish
peccadilloes.

 I started back to the house, and in the drive I met Jeeves. He was at the wheel of Stiffy's
car. Beside him, looking like a Scotch elder rebuking sin, was the dog Bartholomew.

Galahad at Blandings (1965)

 As is so often the case with butlers, there was a good deal of Beach. Julius Caesar, who
liked to have men about him who were fat, would have taken to him at once. He was a
man who had made two chins grow where only one had been before, and his waistcoat
swelled like the sail of a racing yacht.
The Girl in Blue (1970)

 To say that his conscience was clear would be inaccurate, for he did not have a
conscience, but he had what was much better, an alibi...

 His aspect was that of one who has been looking for the leak in a gas pipe with a lighted
candle.

 ‘You’re one of those guys who can make a party just by leaving it. It’s a great gift.’

 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.

Much Obliged, Jeeves (1971)

 My Aunt Agatha, for instance, is tall and thin and looks rather like a vulture in the Gobi
desert, while Aunt Dahlia is short and solid, like a scrum half in the game of Rugby
football. In disposition, too, they differ widely. Aunt Agatha is cold and haughty, though
presumably unbending a bit when conducting human sacrifices at the time of the full
moon, as she is widely rumoured to do, and her attitude towards me has always been
that of an austere governess, causing me to feel as if I were six years old and she had
just caught me stealing jam from the jam cupboard: whereas Aunt Dahlia is as jovial and
bonhomous as a dame in a Christmas pantomime.

 I had not failed to interpret the significance of that dark frown, that bitten lip and those
flashing eyes, nor the way the willowy figure had quivered, indicating, unless she had
caught a chill, that she was as sore as a sunburned neck.

 She had a beaky nose, tight thin lips, and her eye could have been used for splitting logs
in the teak forests of Borneo.

 It just showed once again that half the world doesn’t know how the other three quarters
live.

Sunset at Blandings (1977 (posthumously published))

 Many a man may look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral
staircase.

Old Reliable
 You can't stick lighted matches between the toes of an English butler. He would
raise his eyebrows and freeze you with a glance.You'd feel as if he had caught you using
the wrong fork.

Unsourced
 A man, to use an old-fashioned phrase, of some twenty-eight summers, he gave the
impression at the moment of having experienced at least that number of very hard
winters.

 As he reached the end of the carpet and was about to turn and pace back again, he
stopped abruptly with one foot in the air, looking so like The Soul’s Awakening that a
seasoned art critic would have been deceived.

 He was either a man of about a hundred and fifty who was rather young for his years or
a man of about a hundred and ten who had been aged by trouble.

 ...his head emerged cautiously, like a snail taking a look around after a thunderstorm.

 I don’t suppose she would recognize a deep, beautiful thought if you handed it to her on
a skewer with tartar sauce.

 ‘I’m not speaking to you. I wouldn’t speak to you if your shirt were on fire.’

 Oofy, thinking of the tenner he had given Freddie, writhed like an electric fan.

 She snorted with a sudden violence which twenty-four hours earlier would have
unmanned me completely. Even in my present tolerably robust condition, it affected me
like one of those gas explosions which slay six.

 The Duke’s moustache was rising and falling like seaweed on an ebb-tide.

 Too often, when you introduce a ringer into a gaggle of Pekes, there ensues a scrap like
New Year’s Eve in Madrid; but tonight, after a certain amount of tentative sniffing, the
home team issued their O.K., and he left them all curled up in their baskets like so many
members of The Athenaeum.

 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.

 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.
 “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.”

 “If I had had to choose between him and a cockroach as a companion for a walking-tour,
the cockroach would have had it by a short head.”

 “The lunches of fifty-seven years had caused his chest to slip down to the mezzanine
floor.”

 Uttered in a certain way--dragged out, if you know what I mean, and starting high up
and going down into the lower register, the word "Ah!" can be as sinister and devastating
as the word "Ho!".

 The Duke of Dunstable had one-way pockets. He would walk ten miles in the snow to
chisel an orphan out of tuppence.

 Marriage isn't a process of prolonging the life of love, but of mummifying the corpse.

 Her face was shining like the seat of a bus-driver's trousers.


 "Have you ever tasted such filthy coffee?" "Never" said Joe, though he had lived in
French hotels.

 I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.

 He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but
certainly no more.

 She gave me the sort of look she would have given a leper she wasn't fond of.

 Wilfred Allsop was sitting up, his face pale, his eyes glassy, his hair disordered. He looked
like the poet Shelley after a big night out with Lord Byron.

 She wrinkles her nose at me as if I were a drain that had got out of order.

 The Aberdeen terrier gave me an unpleasant look and said something under his breath in
Gaelic.

 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.

 He was white and shaken, like a dry martini.

 I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.

 She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.

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