Saki Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

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
It was one thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its virtue when one practiced it in a tent.

Saki
Cyprian was a boy who carried with him through early life the wondering look of a dreamer, the eyes of one who sees things that are not visible to ordinary mortals, and invests the commonplace things of this world with qualities unsuspected by plainer folk – the eyes of a poet or a house agent.

Saki
The musician's flabby, redundant figure sat up in bewildered semi-consciousness, like an ice-cream that has been taught to beg.

Saki
The revenge of an elder sister may be long in coming, but, like a South-Eastern express, it arrives in its own good time.

Saki
I hate babies. They're so human—they remind one of monkeys.

Saki
Sredni Vashtar went forth,
His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white.
His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death.
Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful.

Saki
I might have been a goldfish in a glass bowl for all the privacy I got.

Saki
Didn't some cynical critic say the Church of England is the only barrier between England and Christianity?

Saki
Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people.

Saki
To be among people who are smothered in furs when one hasn't any oneself makes one want to break most of the Commandments.

Saki
'Do you know if there was any insanity in her family?' 'Insanity? No, I never heard of any. Her father lives in West Kensington, but I believe he's sane on all other subjects.'

Saki
I am not collecting copies of the cheaper editions of Omar Khayyám. I gave the last four that I received to the lift-boy, and I like to think of him reading them, with FitzGerald's notes, to his aged mother. Lift-boys always have aged mothers; shows such nice feeling on their part, I think.

Saki
Once a female, always a female. Nature is not always infallible but she always abides by her mistakes.

Saki
He seems the incarnation of everything soft and silky and velvety, without a sharp edge in his composition, a dreamer whose philosophy is sleep and let sleep.

Saki
Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me: they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through, wondering what the next course is going to be like — and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeurves.

Saki