P. G. Wodehouse Quotes

379 Sourced Quotes

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
Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.

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

P. G. Wodehouse
[of a character in "The Man Who Gave Up Smoking" who is suffering from a hangover]... the noise of the cat stamping about in the passage outside caused him exquisite discomfort.

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
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
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
The Duke's moustache was rising and falling like seaweed on an ebb-tide.

P. G. Wodehouse
The spine, and I do not attempt to conceal the fact, had become soluble, in the last degree.

P. G. Wodehouse
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.

P. G. Wodehouse
It was that strange, almost unearthly light which comes into the eyes of wronged uncles when they see a chance of getting a bit of their own back from erring nephews.

P. G. Wodehouse
I suppose this was really the moment for embarking upon an impassioned defence of Boko, stressing his admirable qualities. Not being able to think of any, however, I remained silent.

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

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

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
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
"Jeeves," I said, and I am free to admit that in my emotion I bleated like a lamb drawing itself to the attention of the parent sheep, "what the dickens is all this?"

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