Saki

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I always say beauty is only sin deep."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"I might have been a goldfish in a glass bowl for all the privacy I got."

"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."

"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."

"The Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistress."

"The death of John Pennington had left his widow in circumstances which were more straitened than ever, and the Park had receded even from her notepaper, where it had long been retained as a courtesy title on the principle that addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts."

"But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school."

"Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up."

"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."

"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."

"All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's. A few gifted individuals manage to do both."

"You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood."

"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."

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

"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."

"I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"I came here to get freedom from the inane interruptions of the mentally deficient, but it seems I asked too much of fate."

"Romance at short notice was her speciality."

"A beautifully constructed borsch, such as you are going to experience presently, ought not only to banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought."