Saki Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

The Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses.

Saki
Mrs. Troyle paused again, with the self-applauding air of one who has detected an asp lurking in an apple-charlotte.

Saki
Children are given us to discourage our better emotions.

Saki
"I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion," [Clovis] resumed presently. "They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster."

Saki
Reginald closed his eyes with the elaborate weariness of one who has rather nice eyelashes and thinks it useless to conceal the fact.

Saki
Reginald in his wildest lapses into veracity never admits to being more than twenty-two.

Saki
'I must be going,' said Mrs Eggelby, in a tone which had been thoroughly sterilised of even perfunctory regret.

Saki
I came here to get freedom from the inane interruptions of the mentally deficient, but it seems I asked too much of fate.

Saki
The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other.

Saki
'She's leaving her present house and going to Lower Seymour Street.' 'I dare say she will, if she stays there long enough.'

Saki
The death of John Pennington had left his widow in circumstances which were more straitened than ever, and the Park had receded even from her notepaper, where it had long been retained as a courtesy title on the principle that addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts.

Saki
By insisting on having your bottle pointing to the north when the cork is being drawn, and calling the waiter Max, you may induce an impression on your guests which hours of laboured boasting might be powerless to achieve. For this purpose, however, the guests must be chosen as carefully as the wine.

Saki
The sacrifices of friendship were beautiful in her eyes as long as she was not asked to make them.

Saki
People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity; the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.

Saki
Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the yearning of a woman who had no children of her own.

Saki
Madame was not best pleased at being contradicted on a professional matter, and when Madame lost her temper you usually found it afterwards in the bill.

Saki
You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood.

Saki
And they tried to rag me in the smoking room about not being able to hit a bird at five yards, a sort of bovine ragging that suggested cows buzzing round a gadfly and thinking they were teasing it. So I got up the next morning at early dawn – I know it was dawn, because there were lark-noises in the sky, and the grass looked as if it had been left out all night.

Saki
I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.

Saki
Mother, may I go and maffick,
Tear around and hinder traffic?

Saki
Never be a pioneer. It's the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion.

Saki
It is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the average female relative in the country.

Saki
I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.

Saki
Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent.

Saki
Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up.

Saki
Whenever a massacre of Armenians is reported from Asia Minor, every one assumes that it has been carried out "under orders" from somewhere or another; no one seems to think that there are people who might like to kill their neighbours now and then.

Saki
Reginald, in his way, was a pioneer.
None of the rest of his family had anything approaching Titian hair or a sense of humour, and they used primroses as a table decoration.
It follows that they never understood Reginald, who came down late to breakfast, and nibbled toast, and said disrespectful things about the universe. The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast.

Saki
On horseback he seemed to require as many hands as a Hindu god, at least four for clutching the reins, and two more for patting the horse soothingly on the neck.

Saki
His socks compelled one's attention without losing one's respect.

Saki
All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren't respectable live beyond other peoples'.

Saki