“Well-meanin' man. Did it all for the best." Stalky curled gracefully round the stair-rail. "Head in a drain-pipe. Full confession in the left boot.”

“Stalky,' in their school vocabulary, meant clever, well-considered and wily, as applied to plans of action; and 'stalkiness' was the one virtue Corkran toiled after.”

“I've never done any cattle-liftin', but it seems to me-e-e that one might just as well be stalky about a thing as not.”

“He has oppressed Beetle, M'Turk, and me, privatim et seriatim, one by one, as he could catch us. But now he has insulted Number Five up in the music-room, and in the presence of these - these ossifers of the Ninety-third, wot look like hairdressers. Binjimin, we must make him cry "Capivi!"'Stalky's reading did not include Browning or Ruskin.”

“Mad! Quite mad!' said Stalky to the visitors, as one exhibiting strange beasts. 'Beetle reads an ass called Brownin', and M'Turk reads an ass called Ruskin; and-' 'Ruskin isn't an ass,' said M'Turk. 'He's almost as good as the Opium-Eater. He says we're "children of noble races, trained by surrounding art." That means me, and the way I decorated the study when you two badgers would have stuck up brackets and Christmas cards. Child of a noble race, trained by surrounding art, stop reading or I'll shove a pilchard down your neck!”

“How can a man follow the Way or the Great Game when he is eternally pestered by women? There was that girl at the Akrola by the Ford; and there was the scullion's wife behind the dovecote -- not counting the others -- and now comes this one! When I was a child it was well enough, but now I am a man and they will not regard me as a man. Walnuts indeed! Ho! Ho! It is almonds in the Plains!”

“All sensible men are of the same religion, but no sensible man ever tells.”