"Reginald sat in a corner of the Princess's salon and tried to forgive the furniture, which started out with an obvious intention of being Louis Quinze, but relapsed at frequent intervals into Wilhelm II."

"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."

"Temptations came to him, in middle age, tentatively and without insistence, like a neglected butcher-boy who asks for a Christmas box in February for no more hopeful reason than that he didn't get one in December."

"Women and elephants never forget an injury."

"Reginald closed his eyes with the elaborate weariness of one who has rather nice eyelashes and thinks it useless to conceal the fact."

"It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score."

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

"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."

"The sacrifices of friendship were beautiful in her eyes as long as she was not asked to make them."

"People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes."

"Madame was not best pleased at being contradicted on a professional matter, and when Madame lost her temper you usually found it afterwards in the bill."

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

"The animal which the Egyptians worshipped as divine, which the Romans venerated as a symbol of liberty, which Europeans in the ignorant Middle Ages anathematised as an agent of demonology, has displayed to all ages two closely blended characteristics — courage and self-respect. No matter how unfavourable the circumstances, both qualities are always to the fore. Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission to the impending visitation, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance. And disassociate the luxury-loving cat from the atmosphere of social comfort in which it usually contrives to move, and observe it critically under the adverse conditions of civilisation — that civilisation which can impel a man to the degradation of clothing himself in tawdry ribald garments and capering mountebank dances in the streets for the earning of the few coins that keep him on the respectable, or non-criminal, side of society. The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, outcast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it paced of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside."

"A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation."

"I always say beauty is only sin deep."

"If only Saki – the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro – were still alive. The age of Trump needs his brutal dismantling of human stupidities. Despite a coterie of literary fans, Saki’s icy, perfectly constructed short stories have been relatively little read over the past 50 years – years of smug belief in endless progress — but his tales, by turns malevolent and macabre, may be due a revival in our new age of exigency. … He was a glorious pyromaniac let loose in the genteel upper-middle-class Edwardian world he knew so well. In many of his stories, stuffy authority figures are set against forces of nature – polecats, hyenas, tigers. Even if they are not eaten, the humans rarely have the best of it."

"Mother, may I go and maffick, Tear around and hinder traffic?"

"And the sleeper, eye unlidding, Heard a voice for ever bidding Much farewell to Dolly Gray; Turning weary on his truckle- Bed he heard the honey-suckle Lauded in apiarian lay."

"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."

"Which reminds me of the man I read of in some sacred book who was given a choice of what he most desired. And because he didn't ask for titles and honours and dignities, but only for immense wealth, these other things came to him also." "I am sure you didn't read about him in any sacred book." "Yes; I fancy you will find him in Debrett."

"I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly."

"The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other."

"And like every woman who has ever preached repentance to unregenerate youth, she dwelt on the sin of an empty life, which always seems so much more scandalous in the country, where people rise early to see if a new strawberry has happened during the night."

"It is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the average female relative in the country."

"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."

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

"I found everyone talking nervously and feverishly of the weather and the war in South Africa, except Reginald, who was reclining in a comfortable chair with the dreamy, far-away look that a volcano might wear just after it had desolated entire villages."

"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart."

"Put that bloody cigarette out!"

"Reginald in his wildest lapses into veracity never admits to being more than twenty-two."

"You can't expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal's return."

"We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other married couples they sometimes live apart."

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

"To have reached thirty," said Reginald, "is to have failed in life."

"And they tried to rag me in the smoking room about not being able to hit a bird at five yards, a sort of bovine ragging that suggested cows buzzing round a gadfly and thinking they were teasing it. So I got up the next morning at early dawn – I know it was dawn, because there were lark-noises in the sky, and the grass looked as if it had been left out all night."

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

"Children are given us to discourage our better emotions."

"[...] the dragon got three cartsful of angry letters from the Pope (which he dismissed as a load of bulls) [...]"

"Here and there a doorway or low arch concealed the occasional mugger, rapist or lawyer."

"Vote!' [Saint] George rolled his eyes. 'This is an assassination, not a debating society.' - c. 7"

"Besides, [Saint] George pointed out, dragons burn towns and demand princesses as ransom. The dragons, referring to the Siege of Jerusalem, the Sack of Constantinople and a thousand years of dynastic marriages, said, Look who's talking."

"'He didn't smile - he was from Yorkshire, after all - but in some inner chamber of his heart he was satisfied.'"

"'Tact comes as naturally to full-bore handguns as, say, ice-skating to African elephants, but there comes a time when an exceptional individual is prepared to stand up and break the mould.'"

"Like, there's these new fundamentalist religious fanatics, some name like Meek Militant Action. Their aim's to inherit the Earth, provided nobody objects.' - c. 12"

"'Luck, like a Russian car, generally only works if you push it.'"

"Ronnie Bosch sat in his studio, stared long and hard at his drawing board, and groaned."