P. G. Wodehouse

“[Aunt Dahlia to Bertie Wooster] 'To look at you, one would think you were just an ordinary sort of amiable idiot--certifiable, perhaps, but quite harmless. Yet, in reality, you are worse a scourge than the Black Death. I tell you, Bertie, when I contemplate you I seem to come up against all the underlying sorrow and horror of life with such a thud that I feel as if I had walked into a lamp post. I thought as much. Well, it needed but this. I don't see how things could possibly be worse than they are, but no doubt you will succeed in making them so. Your genius and insight will find the way. Carry on, Bertie. Yes, carry on. I am past caring now. I shall even find a faint interest in seeing into what darker and profounder abysses of hell you can plunge this home. Go to it, lad..I remember years ago, when you were in your cradle, being left alone with you one day and you nearly swallowed your rubber comforter and started turning purple. And I, ass that I was, took it out and saved your life. Let me tell you, young Bertie, it will go very hard with you if you ever swallow a rubber comforter again when only I am by to aid.”

“And, as I mused, the years fell away, hair sprouted on the vast steppes of my head, where never hair has been almost within the memory of man.”

“He seemed a little uneasy, and he welcomed me with something of the gratitude of the shipwrecked mariner who sights a sail.”

“You see', said Ukridge, ' I dislike subterfuge'.”

“I've always treated the man with unremitting kindness, and if he wont do a little thing like this for me, I'll kick his spine through his hat.”

“A moment before this voice spoke, Lord Emsworth had been smirking. He now congealed, and the smile passed from his lips like breath off a razor, to be succeeded be a tense look of anxiety and alarm.”

“Something that might have been a very hard and knobbly leg of mutton smote Lord Emsworth violently behind the ear:the sun was turned off at the main: the stars came out, many of them of a singular brightness.”

“I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write.”

“That is life. Just one long succession of misunderstandings and rash acts and what not. Absolutely.”

“I don't know if you suffer in the same way, but with me the act of talking in the nature of real mashed potatoes always induces a sort of prickly sensation and a hideous feeling of shame, together with a marked starting of the pores.”

“One prefers, of course, on all occasions to be stainless and above reproach, but, failing that, the next best thing is unquestionably to have got rid of the body.”

“A cad of the lowest order with a soul as black as his fingernails.”

“He was more like something out of Dickens than anything human.”

“One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room.”

“If England wants a happy, well-fed aristocracy, she mustn't have wars. She can't have it both ways.”

“It is not too much to say I was piqued to the tonsils.”

“He shimmered out, and I sat up in bed with that rather unpleasant feeling you get sometimes that you're going to die in about five minutes.”

“...smoking is just a habit. 'Tolstoy', she said, mentioning someone I hadn't met, 'says that just as much pleasure can be got from twirling the fingers'. My impulse was to tell her Tolstoy was off his onion, but I choked down the heated words. For all I know, the man might be a bosom pal of hers and she might resent criticism of him, however justified.”

“She is a waitress at his lordships club.My God! The Proletariat!The lower middle classes, sir.Well, yes, by stretching it a bit, perhaps.”

“The cells smell is a great feature of French prisons. Ours in No.44 was one of those fine broad-shouldered up and coming young smells, which stand on both feet and look the world in the eye. We became very fond and proud of it.”

“He looked like a Dictator on the point of starting a purge.”

“You can't be a successful dictator and design women's underwear. One or the other. Not both.”

“I turned round and Jeeves shied like a startled mustang.”

“Roderick Spode is the founder of the Saviours of Britain, a fascist organisation better know as the 'Black Shorts'...When you say 'shorts' mean 'shirts', of course.No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.Footer bags, you mean?Yes.How perfectly foul.”

“She uttered a sound rather like an elephant taking its foot out of a mud hole in a Burmese teak forest.”

“Nothing to be done about it except give her a reproachful look. I did this. It made no impression whatever, and she proceeded.”

“Tuppy wiped a fair portion of Hampshire out of his eye, and peered round him in a dazed kind of way...”

“Bingo swayed like a jelly in a high wind.”

“...though the conversation always touched an exceptionally high level of brilliance, there was apt to be a good deal of sugar thrown about.”

“Presently, I was aware that Jeeves was with me. I hadn't heard him come in, but you often don't with Jeeves. He just streams silently from spot A to spot B, like some gas.”

“I drew a deepish breath.”

“I gave it up. The man annoyed me. I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie, but I was dashed if I could see why he couldn't do it with a bright and cheerful smile.”

“The Soul's Awakening expression on his face became intensified. Before my revolted eyes Augustus Fink-Nottle definitely smirked.”

“The general effect was rather as if I had swallowed six-pennorth of dynamite and somebody touched it off inside me.”

“You can't be too careful how you stir up a policeman.”

“So!' he said, at length, and it came as a complete surprise to me that fellows ever really do say 'So!'. I had always thought it was just a thing you read in books.”

“I could not but feel that it was ironical that the old relative should have spoken disparagingly of fawns as a class, sneering at their timidity in that rather lofty and superior manner, for he himself could have walked straight into a gathering of these animals and no questions asked.”

“The silly ass had left the kitchen door open, and I hadn't gone two steps when his voice caught me squarely in the eardrum.'You will find Mr Wooster', he was saying to the substitue chappie, 'an extremely pleasant and amiable young gentleman, but not intelligent. By no means intelligent. Mentally he is negligible - quite negligible'.Well, I mean to say. What!I suppose, strictly speaking, I ought to have charged in and ticked the blighter off properly in no uncertain voice. But I doubht whether it is humanly possible to tick Jeeves off.”

“The unpleasant, acrid smell of burnt poetry.”

“The first intimation I had that things were about to hot up was a pained and disapproving cough from the neighbourhood of the carpet.”

“...Jeeves, whatever his moral defects, would never go about in skirts calling me Bertie.”

“Bingo Little, under the influence of romantic love or, perhaps just under the influence;..once said,'There is no love without perfect trust','Who told you that?' asked Bertie Wooster incredulously.”

“Major-General Sir Wilfred Bosher came to distribute the prizes at that school', proceeded Gussie in a dull, toneless voice.'He dropped a book. He stooped to pick it up. And, as he stooped, his trousers split up the back'.'How we roared!”

“I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going deep down into life and not caring a damn...”

“I laughed derisively."For goodness' sake, don't start gargling now. This is serious.""I was laughing.""Oh, were you? Well, I'm glad to see you taking it in this merry spirit.""Derisively," I explained.”

“It's not that I don't trust you, Dunstable, it's simply that I don't trust you.”

“He was stoutly opposed to the idea of marrying anyone; but if, as happens to the best of us, he ever were compelled to perform the wedding glide, he had always hoped it would be with some lady golf champion who would help him with his putting, and thus, by bringing his handicap down a notch or two, enable him to save something from the wreck, so to speak.”

“It was the look which Ajax had in his eyes when he defied the lightning, the look which nervous husbands have when they announce their intention of going round the corner to bowl a few games with the boys. One could not say definitely that Lord Marshmoreton looked pop-eyed. On the other hand, one could not assert truthfully that he did not.”

“[I'm] as broke as the ten commandments.”

“That is all, Augustus,' she said, and dismissed me with a gesture of loathing, as if I had been a green-fly that had fallen short of even the very moderate level of decency of the average run-of-the-mill green fly.”