Saki - The Chronicles of Clovis (1911)

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You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

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
It's no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself.

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
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 people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.

Saki
People will do things from a sense of duty which they would never attempt as a pleasure.

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

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

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

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
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
You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood.

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
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
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