The Code of the Woosters

by P.G. Wodehouse

You can’t fling the hands up in a passionate gesture when you are driving a car at fifty miles an hour. Otherwise, I should have done so.

I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but a thing I have found in life is that from time to time, as you jog along, there occur moments which you are able to recognize immediately with the naked eye as high spots. Something tells you that they are going to remain etched, if etched is the word I want, for ever on the memory and will come back to you at intervals down the years, as you are dropping off to sleep, banishing that drowsy feeling and causing you to leap on the pillow like a gaffed salmon.

She turned to me, and for the first time became aware that I was no gentleman, but an old friend.

One so frequently finds in girls a disinclination to stick to the important subject.

You know, the more I see of women, the more I think that there ought to be a law. Something has got to be done about this sex, or the whole fabric of Society will collapse, and then what silly asses we shall all look.

It just shows you how true it is that one-half of the world doesn’t know how the other three-quarters lives.

A man thinks he is being chilled steel—or adamant, if you prefer the expression—and suddenly the mists clear away and he finds that he has allowed a girl to talk him into something frightful.

Would it be asking too much of you to attach a stout lead to his collar, thus making the world safe for democracy?’

A man in his position has to watch his step. What people expect from a curate is a zealous performance of his parochial duties. They like to think of him as a chap who preaches about Hivites, Jebusites and what not, speaks the word in season to the backslider, conveys soup and blankets to the deserving bed-ridden and all that sort of thing. When they find him dehelmeting policemen, they look at one another with the raised eyebrow of censure, and ask themselves if he is quite the right man for the job.

I don’t mind people talking rot in my presence, but it must not be utter rot.

It is never pleasant for a chap who has been doing the dominant male to have to change his stance and sink to ignoble pleadings,

You’ve got to keep a father posted about these things. You can’t just let it all slide and have the poor old egg rolling up to the church in a topper and a buttonhole, to find that the wedding is off and nobody bothered to mention it to him.

‘Me? Why the dickens has everything that happens in this ghastly house got to be me?’

‘One begins to get some idea of how the skipper of the Hesperus’s little daughter must have felt. Still, I suppose these tests and trials are good for the character.’