P. G. Wodehouse - Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

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I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
"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
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
You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower.

P. G. Wodehouse
I goggled. Her words did not appear to make sense. They seemed the mere aimless vapouring of an aunt who has been sitting out in the sun without a hat.
"You're pulling my leg."
"I am not pulling your leg. Nothing would induce me to touch your beastly leg."

P. G. Wodehouse
Besides, isn't there something in the book of rules about a man may not marry his cousin? Or am I thinking of grandmothers?
"My dear Tuppy, does one bandy a woman's name?"
"One does if one doesn't want one's ruddy head pulled off."
I saw that it was a special case.

P. G. Wodehouse
"Oh, look," she said. She was a confirmed Oh-looker. I had noticed this at Cannes, where she had drawn my attention in this manner on various occasions to such diverse objects as a French actress, a Provençal filling station, the sunset over the Estorels, Michael Arlen, a man selling coloured spectacles, the deep velvet blue of the Mediterranean, and the late mayor of New York in a striped one-piece bathing suit.

P. G. Wodehouse
"I don't want to seem always to be criticizing your methods of voice production, Jeeves," I said, "but I must inform you that that 'Well, sir' of yours is in many respects fully as unpleasant as your 'Indeed, sir?' Like the latter, it seems to be tinged with a definite scepticism. It suggests a lack of faith in my vision. The impression I retain after hearing you shoot it at me a couple of times is that you consider me to be talking through the back of my neck, and that only a feudal sense of what is fitting restrains you from substituting for it the words 'Says you!'"
"Oh? I didn't know that."
"There isn't much you do know."

P. G. Wodehouse
There is enough sadness in life without having fellows like Gussie Fink-Nottle going about in sea boots.

P. G. Wodehouse
Scarcely had I entered the sitting-room when I found... what appeared at first sight to be the Devil, A closer scrutiny informed me that it was Gussie Fink-Nottle, dressed as Mephistopheles.

P. G. Wodehouse
Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.

P. G. Wodehouse
It isn't often that Aunt Dahlia, lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.

P. G. Wodehouse
As for Gussie Finknottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming on sight.

P. G. Wodehouse
I was reading in the paper the other day about those birds who are trying to split the atom, the nub being that they haven't the foggiest as to what will happen if they do. It may be all right. On the other hand, it may not be all right. And pretty silly a chap would feel, no doubt, if, having split the atom, he suddenly found the house going up in smoke and himself torn limb from limb.

P. G. Wodehouse
If you can visualize a bulldog which has just been kicked in the ribs and had its dinner sneaked by the cat, you will have Hildebrand Glossop as he now stood before me.
"I've been through hell, Bertie."
"Through where?"
"Hell."
"Oh, hell? And what took you there?"

P. G. Wodehouse
I charged into something which might have been a tree, but was not—being, in point of fact, Jeeves.
"Jeeves, I'm engaged."
"I hope you will be very happy, sir."
"Don't be an ass. I'm engaged to Miss Bassett."

P. G. Wodehouse
"But why do you want me? I mean, what am I? Ask yourself that."
"I often have."
"I'm hopeless at a game like that. Ask Jeeves about the time I got lugged in to address a girls' school. I made the most colossal ass of myself."
"And I confidently anticipate that you will make an equally colossal ass of yourself on the thirty-first of this month. That's why I want you. The way I look at it is that, as the thing is bound to be a frost, anyway, one may as well get a hearty laugh out of it."

P. G. Wodehouse
In build and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog, and his aspect now was that of one of these fine animals who has just been refused a slice of cake.

P. G. Wodehouse
We do not tell old friends beneath our roof-tree that they are an offence to the eyesight.

P. G. Wodehouse
And a moment later there was a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and the relative had crossed the threshold at fifty m. p. h. under her own steam.

P. G. Wodehouse
And, anyway, no matter how much you may behave like the deaf adder of Scripture which, as you are doubtless aware, the more one piped, the less it danced, or words to that effect, I shall carry on as planned.

P. G. Wodehouse
My Aunt Agatha, the curse of the Home Counties and a menace to one and all.

P. G. Wodehouse