Best P. G. Wodehouse Quotes

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.

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

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

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

There are some things a chappie's mind absolutely refuses to picture, and Aunt Julia singing 'Rumpty-tiddley-umpty-ay' is one of them.

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.

At five minutes to eleven on the morning named he was at the station, a false beard and spectacles shielding his identity from the public eye. If you had asked him he would have said that he was a Scotch business man. As a matter a fact, he looked far more like a motor-car coming through a haystack.

“As a sleuth you are poor. You couldn’t detect a bass-drum in a telephone-booth.”

The village of Market Blandings is one of those sleepy hamlets which modern progress has failed to touch... The church is Norman, and the intelligence of the majority of the natives palaeozoic.

A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

…when you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

She cried in a voice that hit me between the eyebrows and went out at the back of my head.

I goggled. Her words did not appear to make sense. They seemed the mere aimless vapouring of an aunt who has been sitting out in the sun without a hat.

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

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.

And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.

He wore the unmistakable look of a man about to be present at a row between women, and only a wet cat in a strange backyard bears itself with less jauntiness than a man faced by such a prospect.

At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.

"Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary," murmured Psmith.

Henry glanced hastily at the mirror. Yes, he did look rather old. He must have overdone some of the lines on his forehead. He looked something between a youngish centenarian and a nonagenarian who had seen a good deal of trouble.

His was a life which lacked, perhaps, the sublimer emotions which raised Man to the level of the gods, but it was undeniably an extremely happy one. He never experienced the thrill of ambition fulfilled, but, on the other hand, he never knew the agony of ambition frustrated....

Work, the what's-its-name of the thingummy and the thing-um-a-bob of the what d'you-call-it.

For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been!

Bradbury Fisher shuddered from head to foot, and his legs wobbled like asparagus stalks.

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

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.

My Aunt Agatha, the curse of the Home Counties and a menace to one and all.

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.

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say “When!”

This done, he felt a little—not much, but a little—better. Before, he would have gladly murdered Beach and James and danced on their graves. Now, he would have been satisfied with straight murder.

At this moment, the laurel bush, which had hitherto not spoken, said "Psst!"

A certain critic—for such men, I regret to say, do exist—made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained “all the old Wodehouse characters under different names”. ... With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled this man by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.

...the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.