Humorists

"She’s all for not letting the sun go down without having started something calculated to stagger humanity."

"‘Are you sure?’ I said that sure was just what I wasn’t anything but."

"Whenever there is a job to be taken on of a kind calculated to make Humanity shudder, the cry goes up, ‘Let Wooster do it.’"

"...I mean to say, when a girl, offered a good man’s heart, laughs like a bursting paper bag and tells him not to be a silly ass, the good man is entitled, I think, to assume that the whole thing is off."

"Oofy, thinking of the tenner he had given Freddie, writhed like an electric fan."

"Attila the Hun might have broken off his engagement to her, but nobody except Attila the Hun, and he only on one of his best mornings."

"It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo."

"Never put anything on paper, my boy, and never trust a man with a small black moustache."

"He had that self-reproachful feeling of having been remiss which comes to Generals who wake up one morning to discover that they have carelessly allowed themselves to be outflanked."

"Nannie Bruce, a tall, gangling light-heavyweight with a suggestion in her appearance of a private in the Grenadiers dressed up to play the title role in Charley’s Aunt, was one of those doggedly faithful retainers who adhere to almost all old families like barnacles to the hulls of ships...She was as much a fixture as the stone lions or the funny smell in the attic."

"I don't know if you have ever seen a tiger of the jungle drawing a deep breath preparatory to doing a swan dive and landing with both the feet on the backbone of one of the minor fauna. Probably not, nor, as a matter of fact, have I."

"Oh, Bertie, if I ever called you a brainless poop who ought to be given a scholarship at some lunatic asylum, I take back the words."

"And as he, too, seemed disinclined for chit-chat, we stood for some moments like a couple of Trappist monks who have run into each other at the dog races."

"Before my eyes he wilted like a wet sock."

"As plainly as if it had been the top line on the oculist’s chart I could see what the future held for Bertram."

"I agreed the situation was sticky. Indeed, offhand it was difficult to see how it could have been more glutinous."

"It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't."

"For some moments after silence had come like a poultice to heal the blows of sound, all that occupied his mind was the thought of what pests the gentler sex were when they got hold of a telephone. The instrument seemed to go to their heads like a drug. Connie Keeble, for instance. Nice sensible woman when you talked to her face to face, never tried to collar the conversation and all that, but the moment she got on the telephone, it was gab, gab, gab, and all about nothing."

"Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes."

"The junior partner of Caine and Cooper, though a man of blameless life, had one of those dark, saturnine faces which suggest a taste for the more sinister forms of crime, and on one cheek of that dark, saturnine face was a long scar. Actually it had been caused by the bursting of a gingerbeer bottle at a Y.M.C.A. picnic, but it gave the impression of being the outcome of battles with knives in the cellars of the underworld."

"For an author Jerry Vail was rather nice-looking, most authors, as is widely known, resembling in appearance the more degraded types of fish, unless they look like birds, when they could pass as vultures and no questions asked."

"As far as the eye could reach, I found myself gazing on a surging sea of aunts. There were tall aunts, short aunts, stout aunts, thin aunts, and an aunt who was carrying on a conversation in a low voice to which nobody seemed to be paying the slightest attention."

"On the cue 'five aunts' I had given at the knees a trifle, for the thought of being confronted with such a solid gaggle of aunts, even if those of another, was an unnerving one. Reminding myself that in this life it is not aunts that matter, but the courage that one brings to them, I pulled myself together."

"The stationmaster’s whiskers are of a Victorian bushiness and give the impression of having been grown under glass."

"It seemed to me, thinking quick, that the only way of solving the am-parce [impasse] was to sacrifice Shorty. Like Russian peasants with their children, you know, when they are pursued by wolves and it becomes imperative to lighten the sledge."

"Breakfast had been prepared by the kitchen maid, an indifferent performer who had used the scorched earth policy on the bacon again."

"When news had reached me through well-informed channels that my Aunt Agatha for many years a widow, or derelict, as I believed it is called, was about to take another pop at matrimony, my first emotion, as was natural in the circumstances, had been a gentle pity for the unfortunate goop slated to step up the aisle with her - she, as you are aware, being my tough aunt, the one who eats broken bottles and conducts human sacrifices by the light of the full moon."

"We exchanged a meaning glance. Or, rather, two meaning glances, I giving him one and he giving me the other."

"There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action."

"She laughed - a solo effort. Nothing in the prevailing circumstances made me feel like turning it into a duet."

"However devoutly a girl may worship the man of her choice, there always comes a time when she feels an irresistible urge to haul off and let him have it in the neck."

"He vanished abruptly, like an eel going into mud."

"I don’t say I’ve got much of a soul, but, such as it is, I’m perfectly satisfied with the little chap. I don’t want people fooling about with it. ‘Leave it alone,’ I say. ‘Don’t touch it. I like it the way it is.’"

"On his good mornings, I don't suppose there are more than a handful of men in the W. 1 postal district of London swifter to spot oompus-boompus than Bertram Wooster, and this was one of my particularly good mornings. I saw the whole hideous plot."

"I suppose this was really the moment for embarking upon an impassioned defence of Boko, stressing his admirable qualities. Not being able to think of any, however, I remained silent."

"His eyes were rolling in their sockets, and his face had taken on the colour and expression of a devout tomato. I could see he loved like a thousand bricks."

"Aunt Agatha is like an elephant—not so much to look at, for in appearance she resembles more a well-bred vulture, but because she never forgets."

"[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."