“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.”

“This is the age of the specialist, and years ago Rollo had settled on his career. Even as a boy, hardly capable of connected thought, he had been convinced that his speciality, the one thing he could do really well, was to inherit money.”

“Apparently that dog of hers joined you in the water.”Yes, that’s right, he took his dip with the rest of us. But what’s that got to do with it?”Wilbert Cream dived in and saved him.”He could have got ashore perfectly well under his own steam. In fact, he was already on his way, doing what looked like an Australian crawl.”That wouldn’t occur to a pinhead like Phyllis. To her Wilbert Cream is the man who rescued her dachshund from a watery grave. So she’s going to marry him.”But you don’t marry fellows because they rescue dachshunds.”You do, if you’ve got a mentality like hers.”

“[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.”

“...with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature.”

“He seemed to be doing his best to marry into a family of pronounced loonies, and how the deuce he thought he was going to support even a mentally afflicted wife on nothing a year beat me. Old Bittlesham was bound to knock off his allowance if he did anything of the sort and, with a fellow like young Bingo, if you knocked off his allowance, you might just as well hit him on the head with an axe and make a clean job of it.”

“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.”