Saki Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

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
The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went.

Saki
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened. It's only the middle-aged who are really conscious of their limitations — that is why one should be so patient with them.

Saki
To die before being painted by Sargent is to go to Heaven prematurely.

Saki