P. G. Wodehouse (1881 – 1975)
English comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years.
'There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, "Do trousers matter?"'
‘The mood will pass, sir.’
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.
Dark hair fell in a sweep over his forehead. He looked like a man who would write vers libre, as indeed he did.
As plainly as if it had been the top line on the oculist’s chart I could see what the future held for Bertram.
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.
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...
"The fellow with a face rather like a walnut."
The stationmaster’s whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass.
In one second, without any previous training or upbringing, he had become the wettest man in Worcestershire.
I started violently, as if some unseen hand had goosed me.
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.’
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.
Oofy, thinking of the tenner he had given Freddie, writhed like an electric fan.
She’s all for not letting the sun go down without having started something calculated to stagger humanity.
‘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.’
There are girls, few perhaps but to be found if one searches carefully, who when their advice is ignored and disaster ensues, do not say "I told you so". Mavis was not of their number.
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!'
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.
'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 to-day with the ones I used to know as a boy. I remember walking one day in 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 holster and looked at the man, who gave one choking gasp and fell back against the railings, without a mark on him but with an awful look of horror in his staring 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.'
"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!'"