P. G. Wodehouse Quotes

379 Sourced Quotes

There are men who fear repartee in a wife more keenly than a sword.

P. G. Wodehouse
This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.

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 fulfilled, but, on the other hand, he never knew the agony of ambition frustrated. His name, when he died, would not live for ever in England's annals; he was spared the pain of worrying about this by the fact that he had no desire to live for ever in England's annals. He was possibly as nearly contented a human being can be in this century of alarms and excursions.

P. G. Wodehouse
The storm is over, there is sunlight in my heart. I have a glass of wine and sit thinking of what has passed.

P. G. Wodehouse
'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
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.

P. G. Wodehouse
Naturally a detective doesn't want to look like a detective, and give the whole thing away right at the start.

P. G. Wodehouse
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.

P. G. Wodehouse
I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.

P. G. Wodehouse
That is life. Just one long succession of misunderstandings and rash acts and what not. Absolutely.

P. G. Wodehouse
'Have you ever seen Spode eat asparagus?'
'No.'
'Revolting. It alters one's whole conception of Man as Nature's last word.'

P. G. Wodehouse
I consider that of all the dashed silly, drivelling ideas I ever heard in my puff this is the most blithering and futile. It won't work. Not a chance.

P. G. Wodehouse
My Aunt Agatha, for instance, is tall and thin and looks rather like a vulture in the Gobi desert, while Aunt Dahlia is short and solid, like a scrum half in the game of Rugby football. In disposition, too, they differ widely. Aunt Agatha is cold and haughty, though presumably unbending a bit when conducting human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, as she is widely rumoured to do, and her attitude towards me has always been that of an austere governess, causing me to feel as if I were six years old and she had just caught me stealing jam from the jam cupboard: whereas Aunt Dahlia is as jovial and bonhomous as a dame in a Christmas pantomime.

P. G. Wodehouse
I'm bound to say that New York's a topping place to be exiled in. Everybody was awfully good to me, and there seemed to be plenty of things going on, and I'm a wealthy bird, so everything was fine.

P. G. Wodehouse
Stiffy was one of those girls who enjoy in equal quantities the gall of an army mule and the calm insouciance of a fish on a slab of ice.

P. G. Wodehouse
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
Even at normal times Aunt Dahlia's map tended a little towards the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on so pronounced a richness as now. She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.

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

P. G. Wodehouse
He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.

P. G. Wodehouse
There is about him something that seems to soothe and hypnotize. To the best of my knowledge, he has never encountered a charging rhinoceros, but should this contingency occur, I have no doubt that the animal, meeting his eye, would check itself in mid-stride, roll over and lie purring with its legs in the air.
"Bertie, do you read Tennyson?"
"Not if I can help."

P. G. Wodehouse
There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter.

P. G. Wodehouse
It has been well said that it is precisely these moments when we are feeling that ours is the world and everything that's in it that Fate selects for sneaking up on us with the rock in the stocking.

P. G. Wodehouse
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