Pelham Grenville Wodehouse citations

Page 2

“I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.”

“The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.”

“There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.”

“Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.”

“If he had a mind, there was something on it.”

“You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”

“I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.”

“In a series of events, all of which had been a bit thick, this, in his opinion, achieved the maximum of thickness.”

“As we grow older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.”

“I hadn't the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself.”

“She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.”

“It is true of course, that I have a will of iron, but it can be switched off if the circumstances seem to demand it.”

“What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?”

“I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.”

“It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.”

“Some minds are like soup in a poor restaurant—better left unstirred.”

“Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his head first, and if it rings solid, don't hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him.”

“Hell, it is well known, has no fury like a woman who wants her tea and can't get it.”

“Love is a delicate plant that needs constant tending and nurturing, and this cannot be done by snorting at the adored object like a gas explosion and calling her friends lice.”

“Whenever I get that sad, depressed feeling, I go out and kill a policeman.”

“She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built round her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season.”

“It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.”

“Well, you know, there are limits to the sacred claims of friendship.”

“He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.”

“We Woosters do not lightly forget. At least, we do - some things - appointments, and people's birthdays, and letters to post, and all that - but not an absolutely bally insult like the above.”

“A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.”

“What do ties matter, Jeeves, at a time like this?'
There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter”

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. One of the things which Gertrude Butterwick had impressed on Monty Bodkin when he left for his holiday on the Riviera was that he must be sure to practise his French, and Gertrude’s word was law. So now, though he knew that it was going to make his nose tickle, he said:
‘Er, garçon.’
‘M’sieur?’
‘Er, garçon, esker-vous avez un spot de l’encre et une piece de papier—note papier, vous savez—et une envelope et une plume.’
The strain was too great. Monty relapsed into his native tongue.
‘I want to write a letter,’ he said. And having, like all lovers, rather a tendency to share his romance with the world, he would probably have added ‘to the sweetest girl on earth’, had not the waiter already bounded off like a retriever, to return a few moments later with the fixings.
‘V’la, sir! Zere you are, sir,’ said the waiter. He was engaged to a girl in Paris who had told him that when on the Riviera he must be sure to practise his English. ‘Eenk—pin—pipper—enveloppe—and a liddle bit of bloddin-pipper.’
‘Oh, merci,’ said Monty, well pleased at this efficiency. ‘Thanks. Right-ho.’
‘Right-ho, m’sieur,’ said the waiter.”

“The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.”