Robert Stewart > Robert's Quotes

“What George was thinking was that the late king Herod had been unjustly blamed for a policy which had been both statesmanlike and in the interests of the public. He was blaming the mawkish sentimentality of the modern legal system which ranks the evisceration and secret burial of small boys as a crime.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, A Damsel in Distress

“The proprietor of the grocery store on the corner was bidding a silent farewell to a tomato which even he, though a dauntless optimist, had been compelled to recognize as having outlived its utility.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, A Damsel in Distress

“She came leaping towards me, like Lady Macbeth coming to get first-hand news from the guest-room.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning

“Miss Elizabeth Mapp might have been forty, and she had taken advantage of this opportunity by being just a year or two older. Her face was of high vivid colour and was corrugated by chronic rage and curiosity; but these vivifying emotions had preserved to her an astonishing activity of mind and body, which fully accounted for the comparative adolescence with which she would have been credited anywhere except in the charming little town which she had inhabited so long. Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil.”
― E.F. Benson, Miss Mapp

“In private life, Lottie Blossom tended to substitute for wistfulness and pathos a sort of “Passed-For-Adults-Only” joviality which expressed itself outwardly in a brilliant and challenging smile, and inwardly and spiritually in her practice of keeping alligators in wickerwork baskets and asking unsuspecting strangers to lift the lid.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins

“With regard to religion, finally, it may be briefly said that she believed in God in much the same way as she believed in Australia. For she had no doubts whatever as to the existence of either; and she went to church on Sunday in much the same spirit as she would look at a kangaroo in the zoological gardens; for kangaroos came from Australia.”
― E.F. Benson, Queen Lucia

“Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“There is a certain amount which I shan't mention publicly," Elizabeth said. "Things about Lucia which I should never dream of stating openly."
"Those are just the ones I should like to hear about most," said Diva. "Just a few little titbits.”
― E.F. Benson, Mapp and Lucia

“The covers of this book are too far apart.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
― Omar Khayyám

“A tontine is a kind of primitive insurance fund, combined with a sort of lottery. And while it has many flaws as a financial scheme, as a literary device…”
― Robert Bruce Stewart, Humbug on the Hudson

“I was greeted by the Ulmers’ eleven-year-old daughter, a girl of remarkable poise. Mrs. Ulmer was busily typing a manuscript that needed to make the evening mail and after welcoming me, in a very friendly manner, she returned to work. There were two other children and Mr. Ulmer, who was writing the manuscript just as his wife was typing it. The youngest child, who could have been no more than five or six, had the task of relaying the handwritten pages from his father to his eldest sister, who would quickly scan them for errors, and from her to his mother. The middle child, a little girl of seven or eight, lay on the floor with a large dictionary and would look up words when called upon by her parents or sister.”
― Robert Bruce Stewart, The Birth of M.E. Meegs

“Well, I mean, if someone is going to kill my husband, I think it should be me. Don’t you agree?”
I do indeed,” Emmie said. “I made the same argument myself just a week ago.”
― Robert Bruce Stewart, Crossings

“Vera incessu patuit dea.
(The goddess indubitable was revealed in her step.)”
― Virgil, The Aeneid