P. G. Wodehouse (1881 – 1975)
English comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years.
There came from without the hoof-beats of a galloping relative and Aunt Dahlia whizzed in.
He groaned slightly and winced, like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for lunch.
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.
I don’t suppose she would recognize a deep, beautiful thought if you handed it to her on a skewer with tartare sauce.
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.
Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.' (quoting John Greenleaf Whittier)
It seemed to me, thinking quick, that the only way of solving the am-parce [impasse] was to sacrifice Shorty. Like Russian peasants with their children, you know, when they are pursued by wolves and it becomes imperative to lighten the sledge.
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.
'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.
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.
‘Are you sure?’ I said that sure was just what I wasn’t anything but.
I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
Routine is the death to heroism.
Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.
Many a man may look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase.
It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.
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.
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.
She cried in a voice that hit me between the eyebrows and went out at the back of my head.
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.