Playwrights From England

"[Hemmingway] seemed disposed to conversation. "A lot of wasps there are about this summer," he said. "One sang right past my ear just then." --"I wish it had bitten you," said Poskitt. "Wasps," replied Hemmingway, who had dabbled in natural history, "do not bite. They sting. You are thinking of snakes." --"Your society would make anyone think of snakes." "Gentlemen," I said. "Gentlemen!""

"Mere abuse is no criticism."

"His whole aspect was that of a man who has unexpectedly been struck by lightning."

"Bingo swayed like a jelly in a high wind."

"He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg."

"The Duke’s moustache was rising and falling like seaweed on an ebb-tide."

"The cosy glow which had been enveloping the Duke became shot through by a sudden chill. It was as if he had been luxuriating in a warm shower-bath, and some hidden hand had turned on the cold tap."

"It began to be borne in upon Lord Ickenham that in planning to appeal to the Duke’s better feelings he had omitted to take into his calculations the fact that he might not have any."

"'Don't blame me, Pongo,' said Lord Ickenham, 'if Lady Constance takes her lorgnette to you. God bless my soul, though, you can't compare the lorgnettes of to-day with the ones I used to know as a boy. I remember walking one day in Grosvenor Square with my aunt Brenda and her pug dog Jabberwocky, and a policeman came up and said the latter ought to be wearing a muzzle. My aunt made no verbal reply. She merely whipped her lorgnette from its holster and looked at the man, who gave one choking gasp and fell back against the railings, without a mark on him but with an awful look of horror in his staring eyes, as if he had seen some dreadful sight. A doctor was sent for, and they managed to bring him round, but he was never the same again. He had to leave the Force, and eventually drifted into the grocery business. And that is how Sir Thomas Lipton got his start.'"

"there entered a young man of great height but lacking the width of shoulder and ruggedness of limb which make height impressive. Nature, stretching Horace Davenport out, had forgotten to stretch him sideways, and one could have pictured Euclid, had they met, nudging a friend and saying:‘Don't look now, but this chap coming along illustrates exactly what I was telling you about a straight line having length without breadth"

"Whatever may be said in favour of the Victorians, it is pretty generally admitted that few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks."

"Directing an austere look at Tubby’s receding back, she spoke in a cold crisp voice which sounded in the drowsy stillness like ice tinkling in a pitcher."

"Like so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag."

"She snorted with a sudden violence which twenty-four hours earlier would have unmanned me completely. Even in my present tolerably robust condition, it affected me like one of those gas explosions which slay six."

"I don’t suppose she would recognize a deep, beautiful thought if you handed it to her on a skewer with tartare sauce."

"...his head emerged cautiously, like that of a snail taking a look around after a thunderstorm."

"'I want to know what the devil you mean by keeping coming into my private apartment, taking up space which I require for other purposes and interrupting me when I am chatting with my personal friends. Really one gets about as much privacy in this house as a strip-tease dancer.'"

"I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but a thing I have found in life is that from time to time, as you jog along, there occur moments which you are able to recognize immediately with the naked eye as high spots. Something tells you that they are going to remain etched, if etched is the word I want, for ever on the memory and will come back to you at intervals down the years, as you are dropping off to sleep, banishing that drowsy feeling and causing you to leap on the pillow like a gaffed salmon."

"’You know your Shelley, Bertie!’ ‘Oh, am I?’"

"'You can't be a successful Dictator and design women's underclothing.' 'No, sir.' 'One or the other. Not both.' 'Precisely, sir.'"

"There came from without the hoof-beats of a galloping relative and Aunt Dahlia whizzed in."

"Stiffy was one of those girls who enjoy in equal quantities the gall of an army mule and the calm insouciance of a fish on a slab of ice."

"'There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, "Do trousers matter?"' ‘The mood will pass, sir.’"

"The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"

"Prismatic is the only word for those frightful tweeds and, oddly enough, the spectacle of them had the effect of steadying my nerves. They gave me the feeling that nothing mattered."

"'Have you ever seen Spode eat asparagus?' 'No.' 'Revolting. It alters one's whole conception of Man as Nature's last word.'"

"It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof."

"[of Spode] He was, as I had already been able to perceive, a breath-taking cove. About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla and had changed its mind at the last moment."

"Aunt Agatha, who eats broken bottles and wears barbed wire next to the skin."

"I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled."

"‘Oh Brancepeth,’ said the girl, her voice trembling, ‘why haven’t you any money? If only you had the merest pittance - enough for a flat in Mayfair and a little weekend place in the country somewhere and a couple of good cars and a villa in the South of France and a bit of trout fishing on some decent river, I would risk all for love.’"

"He then gave a hideous laugh and added that, if anybody was interested in his plans, he was going to join the Foreign Legion, that cohort of the damned in which broken men may toil and die and dying, forget. ‘Beau Widgeon?’ said the Egg, impressed. ‘What ho!’"

"’You must remember, Father,’ said Mavis, in a voice which would have had an Eskimo slapping his ribs and calling for the steam-heat, ‘that this girl was probably very pretty. So many of these New York girls are. That would, of course, explain Frederick's behaviour.’"

"‘Do you know,’ said a thoughtful Bean, ‘I’ll bet that if all the girls Freddie Widgeon has loved were placed end to end—not that I suppose one could do it—they would reach half-way down Piccadilly.’ ‘Further than that,’ said the Egg. ‘Some of them were pretty tall.’"

"It was a harsh, rasping voice, in its timbre not unlike a sawmill."

"I shuddered from stem to stern, as stout barks do when buffeted by the waves."

"If Eggy wanted to get spliced, let him, was the way I looked at it. Marriage might improve him. It was difficult to think of anything that wouldn’t."

"'Didn't Frankenstein get married?' 'Did he?' said Eggy. 'I don't know. I never met him. Harrow man, I expect.'"

"A young man with dark circles under his eyes was propping himself up against a penny-in-the-slot machine. An undertaker, passing at that moment, would have looked at this young man sharply, scenting business. So would a buzzard."

"He had never acted in his life, and couldn't play the pin in Pinafore."

"Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. One of the things which Gertrude Butterwick had impressed on Monty Bodkin when he left for his holiday on the Riviera was that he must be sure to practise his French, and Gertrude’s word was law. So now, though he knew that it was going to make his nose tickle, he said: ‘Er, garçon.’ ‘M’sieur?’ ‘Er, garçon, esker-vous avez un spot de l’encre et une piece de papier—note papier, vous savez—et une envelope et une plume.’ The strain was too great. Monty relapsed into his native tongue. ‘I want to write a letter,’ he said. And having, like all lovers, rather a tendency to share his romance with the world, he would probably have added ‘to the sweetest girl on earth’, had not the waiter already bounded off like a retriever, to return a few moments later with the fixings. ‘V’la, sir! Zere you are, sir,’ said the waiter. He was engaged to a girl in Paris who had told him that when on the Riviera he must be sure to practise his English. ‘Eenk—pin—pipper—enveloppe—and a liddle bit of bloddin-pipper.’ ‘Oh, merci,’ said Monty, well pleased at this efficiency. ‘Thanks. Right-ho.’ ‘Right-ho, m’sieur,’ said the waiter."

"A sort of gulpy, gurgly, plobby, squishy, wofflesome sound, like a thousand eager men drinking soup in a foreign restaurant."

"It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine."

"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."

"I charged into something which might have been a tree, but was not — being, in point of fact, Jeeves."

"If the prophet Job were to walk into the room at this moment, I could sit swapping hard-luck stories with him till bedtime.""

"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."

"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."

""I hadn't heard the door open, but the man was on the spot once more. My private belief, as I think I have mentioned before, is that Jeeves doesn't have to open doors. He's like one of those birds in India who bung their astral bodies about — the chaps, I mean, who having gone into thin air in Bombay, reassemble the parts and appear two minutes later in Calcutta. Only some such theory will account for the fact that he's not there one moment and is there the next. He just seems to float from Spot A to Spot B like some form of gas."

"She loves this newt-nuzzling blister."