P. G. Wodehouse Quotes

379 Sourced Quotes

I never was interested in politics. I'm quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent feeling. Just as I'm about to feel belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings.

P. G. Wodehouse
When I was a child, I used to think that rabbits were gnomes, and that if I held my breath and stayed quite still, I should see the fairy queen.. Indicating with a reserved gesture that this was just the sort of loony thing I should have expected her to think as a child, I returned to the point.

P. G. Wodehouse
Like so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.

P. G. Wodehouse
The discovery of a toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn. Ten minutes of this and I was enabled to return to the bedchamber much more the old merry Bertram.

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

P. G. Wodehouse
You would be miserable if you had to go through life with a human doormat with 'Welcome' written on him. You want some one made of sterner stuff. You want, as it were, a sparring-partner, some one with whom you can quarrel happily with the certain knowledge that he will not curl up in a ball for you to kick, but will be there with the return wallop.

P. G. Wodehouse
'You're one of those guys who can make a party just by leaving it. It's a great gift.'

P. G. Wodehouse
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.

P. G. Wodehouse
The Bishop…was talking to the local Master of Hounds about the difficulty he had in keeping his vicars off the incense.

P. G. Wodehouse
She could not have gazed at him with a more rapturous intensity if she had been a small child and he a saucer of ice cream.

P. G. Wodehouse
It's a funny thing about looking for things. If you hunt for a needle in a haystack you don't find it. If you don't give a darn whether you ever see the needle or not it runs into you the first time you lean against the stack.

P. G. Wodehouse
The only thing that prevented a father's love from faltering was the fact that there was in his possession a photograph of himself at the same early age, in which he, too, looked like a homicidal fried egg.

P. G. Wodehouse
'Are you sure?' I said that sure was just what I wasn't anything but.

P. G. Wodehouse
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.

P. G. Wodehouse
What a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean.

P. G. Wodehouse
It was the being without advisers that made the situation bleak. On these occasions when Fate, having biffed you in the eye, proceeds to kick you in the pants, you want to gather the boys about you and thresh things out, and there weren't any boys to gather..

P. G. Wodehouse
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.

P. G. Wodehouse
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
Mr Beach was too well bred to be inquisitive, but his eyebrows here not. 'Ah!' he said. '?', cried the eyebrows. '? ? ?' Ashe ignored the eyebrows.... Mr Beach's eyebrows were still mutely urging him to reveal all, but Ashe directed his gaze at that portion of the room which Mr Beach did not fill. He was hanged if he was going to let himself be hypnotized by a pair of eyebrows into incriminating himself.

P. G. Wodehouse
Intoxicated? The word did not express it by a mile. He was oiled, boiled, fried, plastered, whiffled, sozzled, and blotto.

P. G. Wodehouse
It began to be borne in upon Lord Ickenham that in planning to appeal to the Duke's better feelings he had omitted to take into his calculations the fact that he might not have any.

P. G. Wodehouse
I had not failed to interpret the significance of that dark frown, that bitten lip and those flashing eyes, nor the way the willowy figure had quivered, indicating, unless she had caught a chill, that she was as sore as a sunburned neck.

P. G. Wodehouse
I was so darned sorry for poor old Corky that I hadn't the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself.

P. G. Wodehouse
I like a man to be a clean, strong, upstanding Englishman who can look his gnu in the face and put an ounce of lead in it.

P. G. Wodehouse
'Didn't Frankenstein get married?'
'Did he?' said Eggy. 'I don't know. I never met him. Harrow man, I expect.'

P. G. Wodehouse
The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.

P. G. Wodehouse
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 Scotch business man. As a matter of fact, he looked far more like a motor-car coming through a haystack.

P. G. Wodehouse
Hugo?' 'Millicent?' 'Is that you?' 'Yes. Is that you?' 'Yes.' Anything in the nature of misunderstanding was cleared away. It was both of them.

P. G. Wodehouse
She had a beaky nose, tight thin lips, and her eye could have been used for splitting logs in the teak forests of Borneo.

P. G. Wodehouse