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Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

The Adventures of Sally (1922)

 * And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.
 * The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.
 * He trusted neither of them as far as he could spit, and he was a poor spitter, lacking both distance and control.
 * It was a cold, disapproving gaze, such as a fastidious luncher who was not fond of caterpillars might have directed at one which he had discovered in his portion of salad.

Carry On, Jeeves (1925)

 * 'Yes, sir,' said Jeeves in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend.


 * Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to face over the breakfast table. Brainy, moreover.


 * The light from the big window fell right on the picture. I took a good look at it. Then I shifted a bit nearer and took another look. Then I went back to where I had been at first, because it hadn't seemed quite so bad from there.

The Heart of a Goof (1926)

 * Dedication: To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.


 * While they were content to peck cautiously at the ball, he never spared himself in his efforts to do it a violent injury.

Summer Lightning (1929)

 * A certain critic—for such men, I regret to say, do exist—made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names’. He has probably now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled this man by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy. (From preface)


 * When you have just been told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.

Very Good, Jeeves (1930)

 * 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!'
 * Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove.


 * In one second, without any previous training or upbringing, he had become the wettest man in Worcestershire.

Big Money (1931)

 * I can't stand Paris. I hate the place. Full of people talking French, which is a thing I bar. It always seems to me so affected.

Thank You, Jeeves (1934)

 * ’Oh, yes, he thinks a lot of you. I remember his very words. 'Mr Wooster, miss' he said 'is, perhaps, mentally somewhat negligible but he has a heart of gold’

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

 * Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.


 * There is enough sadness in life without having fellows like Gussie Fink-Nottle going about in sea boots.


 * A slight throbbing about the temples told me that this discussion had reached saturation point.


 * My Aunt Agatha, the curse of the Home Counties and a menace to one and all.


 * In build and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog, and his aspect now was that of one of these fine animals who has just been refused a slice of cake.


 * "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!'"


 * "Any tutting that's required, I'll attend to myself. And the same applies to clicking the tongue, if you were thinking of doing that."


 * And as for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming him on sight.


 * It just shows that you can bury yourself in the country and still somehow acquire a vocabulary.


 * I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts about a fellow named Pig-something--a sculptor he would have been, no doubt--who made a statue of a girl, and what should happen one morning but that the bally thing suddenly came to life. A pretty nasty shock for the chap, of course.


 * "Oh, look," she said. She was a confirmed Oh-looker. I had noticed this at Cannes, where she had drawn my attention in this manner on various occasions to such diverse objects as a French actress, a Provençal filling station, the sunset over the Estorels, Michael Arlen, a man selling coloured spectacles, the deep velvet blue of the Mediterranean, and the late mayor of New York in a striped one-piece bathing suit.


 * Then he rose and began to pace the room in an overwrought sort of way, like a zoo lion who has heard the dinner-gong go and is hoping the keeper won't forget him in the general distribution.


 * I wouldn't have said off-hand that I had a subconscious mind, but I suppose I must without knowing it, and no doubt it was there, sweating away diligently at the old stand, all the while the corporeal Wooster was getting his eight hours.


 * If you can visualize a bulldog which has just been kicked in the ribs and had its dinner sneaked by the cat, you will have Hildebrand Glossop as he now stood before me.


 * "Beginning with a critique of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum."


 * Besides, isn't there something in the book of rules about a man may not marry his cousin? Or am I thinking of grandmothers?


 * He expressed the opinion that the world was in a deplorable state. I said, 'Don't talk rot, old Tom Travers.' 'I am not accustomed to talk rot,' he said. 'Then, for a beginner,' I said, 'you do it dashed well.' And I think you will admit, boys and ladies and gentlemen, that that was telling him."


 * "I hadn't heard the door open, but the man was on the spot once more. My private belief, as I think I have mentioned before, is that Jeeves doesn't have to open doors. He's like one of those birds in India who bung their astral bodies about--the chaps, I mean, who having gone into thin air in Bombay, reassemble the parts and appear two minutes later in Calcutta. Only some such theory will account for the fact that he's not there one moment and is there the next. He just seems to float from Spot A to Spot B like some form of gas.


 * She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.


 * If the prophet Job were to walk into the room at this moment, I could sit swapping hard-luck stories with him till bedtime."


 * I charged into something which might have been a tree, but was not -- being, in point of fact, Jeeves.


 * "Jeeves, I'm engaged." "I hope you will be very happy, sir." "Don't be an ass. I'm engaged to Miss Bassett."


 * "Bertie, do you read Tennyson?" "Not if I can help it."


 * "Tuppy, old man, the Bassett's going to marry Gussie Fink-Nottle." :"Tough luck on both of them, what?"