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P. G. Wodehouse

216 quotes

“On his good mornings, I don't suppose there are more than a handful of men in the W. 1 postal district of London swifter to spot oompus-boompus than Bertram Wooster, and this was one of my particularly good mornings. I saw the whole hideous plot.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.’”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into mud.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“However devoutly a girl may worship the man of her choice, there always comes a time when she feels an irresistible urge to haul off and let him have it in the neck.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She laughed - a solo effort. Nothing in the prevailing circumstances made me feel like turning it into a duet.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We exchanged a meaning glance. Or, rather, two meaning glances, I giving him one and he giving me the other.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When news had reached me through well-informed channels that my Aunt Agatha for many years a widow, or derelict, as I believed it is called, was about to take another pop at matrimony, my first emotion, as was natural in the circumstances, had been a gentle pity for the unfortunate goop slated to step up the aisle with her - she, as you are aware, being my tough aunt, the one who eats broken bottles and conducts human sacrifices by the light of the full moon.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Breakfast had been prepared by the kitchen maid, an indifferent performer who had used the scorched earth policy on the bacon again.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The stationmaster’s whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the cue 'five aunts' I had given at the knees a trifle, for the thought of being confronted with such a solid gaggle of aunts, even if those of another, was an unnerving one. Reminding myself that in this life it is not aunts that matter, but the courage that one brings to them, I pulled myself together.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As far as the eye could reach, I found myself gazing on a surging sea of aunts. There were tall aunts, short aunts, stout aunts, thin aunts, and an aunt who was carrying on a conversation in a low voice to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For an author Jerry Vail was rather nice-looking, most authors, as is widely known, resembling in appearance the more degraded types of fish, unless they look like birds, when they could pass as vultures and no questions asked.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The junior partner of Caine and Cooper, though a man of blameless life, had one of those dark, saturnine faces which suggest a taste for the more sinister forms of crime, and on one cheek of that dark, saturnine face was a long scar. Actually it had been caused by the bursting of a gingerbeer bottle at a Y.M.C.A. picnic, but it gave the impression of being the outcome of battles with knives in the cellars of the underworld.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For some moments after silence had come like a poultice to heal the blows of sound, all that occupied his mind was the thought of what pests the gentler sex were when they got hold of a telephone. The instrument seemed to go to their heads like a drug. Connie Keeble, for instance. Nice sensible woman when you talked to her face to face, never tried to collar the conversation and all that, but the moment she got on the telephone, it was gab, gab, gab, and all about nothing.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I agreed the situation was sticky. Indeed, offhand it was difficult to see how it could have been more glutinous.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As plainly as if it had been the top line on the oculist’s chart I could see what the future held for Bertram.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Before my eyes he wilted like a wet sock.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And as he, too, seemed disinclined for chit-chat, we stood for some moments like a couple of Trappist monks who have run into each other at the dog races.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh, Bertie, if I ever called you a brainless poop who ought to be given a scholarship at some lunatic asylum, I take back the words.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't know if you have ever seen a tiger of the jungle drawing a deep breath preparatory to doing a swan dive and landing with both the feet on the backbone of one of the minor fauna. Probably not, nor, as a matter of fact, have I.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nannie Bruce, a tall, gangling light-heavyweight with a suggestion in her appearance of a private in the Grenadiers dressed up to play the title role in Charley’s Aunt, was one of those doggedly faithful retainers who adhere to almost all old families like barnacles to the hulls of ships...She was as much a fixture as the stone lions or the funny smell in the attic.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had that self-reproachful feeling of having been remiss which comes to Generals who wake up one morning to discover that they have carelessly allowed themselves to be outflanked.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never put anything on paper, my boy, and never trust a man with a small black moustache.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Attila the Hun might have broken off his engagement to her, but nobody except Attila the Hun, and he only on one of his best mornings.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oofy, thinking of the tenner he had given Freddie, writhed like an electric fan.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...I mean to say, when a girl, offered a good man’s heart, laughs like a bursting paper bag and tells him not to be a silly ass, the good man is entitled, I think, to assume that the whole thing is off.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whenever there is a job to be taken on of a kind calculated to make Humanity shudder, the cry goes up, ‘Let Wooster do it.’”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘Are you sure?’ I said that sure was just what I wasn’t anything but.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She’s all for not letting the sun go down without having started something calculated to stagger humanity.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘Suppose your Aunt Dahlia read in the paper one morning that you were going to be shot at sunrise.’ ‘I couldn’t be, I’m never up so early.’”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘When I say “mind,”’ said the blood relation, ‘I refer to the quarter-teaspoonful of brain which you might possibly find in her head if you sank an artesian well.’”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I started violently, as if some unseen hand had goosed me.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’d always thought her half-baked, but now I think they didn’t even put her in the oven.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘Don't you like this hat?‘ ‘No, sir.‘ ‘Well, I do,‘ I replied rather cleverly, and went out with it tilted just that merest shade over the left eye which makes all the difference.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He’s engaged to be married to Stiffy Byng, and his long years of football should prove an excellent preparation for setting up house with her. The way I look at it is that when a fellow has had plug-uglies in cleated boots doing a Shuffle-off-to-Buffalo on his face Saturday after Saturday since he was a slip of a boy, he must get to fear nothing, not even marriage with a girl like Stiffy, who from early childhood has seldom let the sun go down without starting some loony enterprise calculated to bleach the hair of one and all.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘Stinko, is he?’ 'Not perhaps stinko, but certainly effervescent.’”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'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.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...as I felt my way along the wall I collided with what turned out to be a grandfather clock, for the existence of which I had not budgeted, and it toppled over with a sound like the delivery of several tons of coal through the roof of a conservatory. Glass crashed, pulleys and things parted from their moorings, and as I stood trying to separate my heart from the front teeth in which it had become entangled, the lights flashed on and I beheld Sir Watkyn Bassett.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was expecting Pop Bassett to give an impersonation of a bomb falling on an ammunition dump, but he didn’t. Instead, he continued to exhibit that sort of chilly stiffness which you see in magistrates when they’re fining people five quid for boyish peccadilloes.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘And shove him into a dungeon with dripping walls and see to it that he is well gnawed by rats.’”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I started back to the house, and in the drive I met Jeeves. He was at the wheel of Stiffy's car. Beside him, looking like a Scotch elder rebuking sin, was the dog Bartholomew.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've seen him a couple of times in the arena, and was profoundly impressed by his virtuosity. Rugby football is more or less a sealed book to me, I never having gone in for it, but even I could see he was good. The lissomness with which he moved hither and thither was most impressive, as was his homicidal ardour when doing what I believe is called tackling. Like the Canadian Mounted Police he always got his man, and when he did so the air was vibrant with the excited cries of the morticians in the audience making bids for the body.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As is so often the case with butlers, there was a good deal of Beach. Julius Caesar, who liked to have men about him who were fat, would have taken to him at once. He was a man who had made two chins grow where only one had been before, and his waistcoat swelled like the sail of a racing yacht.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man, to use an old-fashioned phrase, of some twenty-eight summers, he gave the impression at the moment of having experienced at least that number of very hard winters.”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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...”
P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) said by 1975 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source