Quotes by P. G. Wodehouse

“His was a life which lacked, perhaps, the sublimer emotions which raised Man to the level of the gods, but it was undeniably an extremely happy one. He never experienced the thrill of ambition fulf...”

“The village of Market Blandings is one of those sleepy hamlets which modern progress has failed to touch... The church is Norman, and the intelligence of the majority of the natives palaeozoic.”

“In English country towns, if the public houses do not actually outnumber the inhabitants, they all do an excellent trade. It is only when they are two to one that hard times hit them and set the in...”

“At five minutes to eleven on the morning named he was at the station, a false beard and spectacles shielding his identity from the public eye. If you had asked him he would have said that he was a ...”

“‘As a sleuth you are poor. You couldn’t detect a bass-drum in a telephone-booth.’”

“Henry glanced hastily at the mirror. Yes, he did look rather old. He must have overdone some of the lines on his forehead. He looked something between a youngish centenarian and a nonagenarian who ...”

“There are some things a chappie's mind absolutely refuses to picture, and Aunt Julia singing 'Rumpty-tiddley-umpty-ay' is one of them.”

“He wore the unmistakable look of a man about to be present at a row between women, and only a wet cat in a strange backyard bears itself with less jauntiness than a man faced by such a prospect.”

“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.”

“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 miser...”

“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 one of those cold, clammy, accusing sort of eyes--the kind that makes you reach up to see if your tie is straight: and he looked at me as I were some sort of unnecessary product which Cuthbe...”

“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...”

“Dark hair fell in a sweep over his forehead. He looked like a man who would write vers libre, as indeed he did.”

“Love has had a lot of press-agenting from the oldest times; but there are higher, nobler things than love.”

“He was not a man who prattled readily, especially in a foreign tongue. He gave the impression that each word was excavated from his interior by some up-to-date process of mining.”