"Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"And now for something completely different . . . "
— John Cleese

"If they wanted their shit stirred, then stirred their shit was jolly well going to be."
— Stephen Clarke (A Year in the Merde)

"What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?"
— Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)

""Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.""
— Thomas Henry Huxley

"Bicky rocked, like a jelly in a high wind."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"some trillions of years ago a sloppy, dirty giant flicked grease from his fingers. One of those gobs of grease is our universe on its way to the floor. Splat!"
— Brion Gysin

"Man is a bad animal"
— Brion Gysin

"One wonders what would happen in a society in which there were no rules to break. Doubtless everyone would quickly die of boredom. "
— Susan Howatch

"The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right."
— Quentin Crisp

"We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real."
— Ruth Rendell (One Across, Two Down)

"The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Cakes and Ale)

"Then one woman looked directly at her husband. "Is our place gone?"
"I'm afraid so, girl," he said. "There isn't much left up there. But we're alive. We're all lucky to be alive. We'd have been dead if we'd stayed up above."
"Oh, what a mercy we didn't!" she exclaimed. "How lucky we are!"
Incredible though it sounds, within a few moments, a whole lot of people were congratulating each other on their extraordinary good fortune in only having lost all their worldy posessions."
— Ida Cook (Safe Passage)

"Agatha Christie n. A silent, putrid fart committed by someone in this very room, and only one person knows whodunnit."
— VIZ (Roger's Profanisaurus Rex: From the Pages of "Viz", the Ultimate Swearing Dictionary)

"It is sometimes said that butlers only truly exist in England. Other countries, whatever title is actually used, have only manservants. I tend to believe this is true. Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race are capable of. Continentals - and by and large the Celts, as you will no doubt agree - are as a rule unable to control themselves in moments of a strong emotion, and are thus unable to maintain a professional demeanour other than in the least
> challenging of situations. If I may return to my earlier metaphor - you will excuse my putting it so coarsely - they are like a man who will, at the slightest provocation, tear off his suit and his shirt and run about screaming. IN a word, "dignity" is beyond such persons. We English have an important advantage over foreigners in this respect and it is for this reason that when you think of a great butler, he is bound, almost by definition, to be an Englishman."
— Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)

"It is sometimes said that butlers only truly exist in England. Other countries, whatever title is actually used, have only manservants. I tend to believe this is true. Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race are capable of. Continentals - and by and large the Celts, as you will no doubt agree - are as a rule unable to control themselves in moments of a strong emotion, and are thus unable to maintain a professional demeanour other than in the least challenging of situations. If I may return to my earlier metaphor - you will excuse my putting it so coarsely - they are like a man who will, at the slightest provocation, tear off his suit and his shirt and run about screaming. IN a word, "dignity" is beyond such persons. We English have an important advantage over foreigners in this respect and it is for this reason that when you think of a great butler, he is bound, almost by definition, to be an Englishman."
— Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)

""Is God a mathematician?""
— Sir Jmaes Jeans (1847-1946)

"George Smiley: [quoting an old letter from Bill Haydon about Jim Prideaux] He has that heavy quiet that commands. He's my other half. Between us we'd make one marvelous man. He asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends, and I'm vastly tickled by the compliment. He's virgin, about eight foot tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge"
— John le Carré

"Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)

’ Humbly to express
A penitential loneliness.’
"
— Thomas De Quincey

"The British nation is unique in this respect: they are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst."
— Winston Churchill

"corgi 1. n. A high class hound, such as those that accompany the Queen. 2. n. A high class hound, such as the one that accompanies Prince Charles."
— VIZ (Roger's Profanisaurus Rex: From the Pages of "Viz", the Ultimate Swearing Dictionary)

""It is sometimes said that butlers only truly exist in England. Other countries, whatever title is actually used, have only manservants. I tend to believe this is true. Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race are capable of. Continentals - and by and large the Celts, as you will no doubt agree - are as a rule unable to control themselves in moments of a strong emotion, and are thus unable to maintain a professional demeanour other than in the least challenging of situations. If I may return to my earlier metaphor - you will excuse my putting it so coarsely - they are like a man who will, at the slightest provocation, tear off his suit and his shirt and run about screaming. IN a word, "dignity" is beyond such persons. We English have an important advantage over foreigners in this respect and it is for this reason that when you think of a great butler, he is bound, almost by definition, to be an Englishman."
"
— Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)