Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit Quotes

“Love is a delicate plant that needs constant tending and nurturing, and this cannot be done by snorting at the adored object like a gas explosion and calling her friends lice.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“Would you say my head was like a pumpkin, Wooster?’ ‘Not a bit, old man.’ ‘Not like a pumpkin?’ ‘No, not like a pumpkin. A touch of the dome of St Paul’s, perhaps.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit: (Jeeves & Wooster)

“But then everybody says that, though you have a brain like a peahen, you're the soul of kindness and generosity.'
Well, I was handicapped here by the fact that, never having met a peahen, I was unable to estimate the quality of these fowls' intelligence, but she had spoken as if they were a bit short of the grey matter, and I was about the ask her who the hell she meant by 'everybody', when she resumed.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“I like B. Wooster the way he is. Lay off him, I say. Don’t try to change him, or you may lose the flavour. Even when we were merely affianced, I recalled, this woman had dashed the mystery thriller from my hand, instructing me to read instead a perfectly frightful thing by a bird called Tolstoy. At the thought of what horrors might ensue after the clergyman had done his stuff and she had a legal right to bring my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave, the imagination boggled. It was a subdued and apprehensive Bertram Wooster who some moments later reached for the hat and light overcoat and went off to the Savoy to shove food into the Trotters.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“I was conscious of a passing pang for the oyster world, feeling--and I think correctly--that life for these unfortunate bivalves must be one damn thing after another.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“He coughed again, that deferential cough of his which sounds like a well-bred sheep clearing its throat on a distant mountain-top.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“she would be in much the same position as one of those monarchs or dictators who wake up one morning to find that the populace has risen against them and is saying it with bombs.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit: (Jeeves & Wooster)

“It’s called “Caliban At Sunset”.’ ‘What at sunset?’ ‘Caliban.’ He cleared his throat, and began: I stood with a man Watching the sun go down. The air was full of murmurous summer scents And a brave breeze sang like a bugle From a sky that smouldered in the west, A sky of crimson, amethyst and gold and sepia And blue as blue as were the eyes of Helen When she sat Gazing from some high tower in Ilium Upon the Grecian tents darkling below. And he, This man who stood beside me, Gaped like some dull, half-witted animal And said, ‘I say, Doesn’t that sunset remind you Of a slice Of underdone roast beef?’ He”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit: (Jeeves & Wooster)

“What if he does think you the world’s premier louse? Don’t we all?”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit: (Jeeves & Wooster)

“Ah, well,’ I said resignedly, ‘if that’s that, that’s that, what?’ ‘So it would appear, sir.’ ‘Nothing to do but keep the chin up and the upper lip as stiff as can be managed. I think I’ll go to bed with an improving book. Have you read The Mystery of the Pink Crayfish by Rex West?”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit: (Jeeves & Wooster)

“A few moments later the man was with us, looking so brainy and intelligent that my heart leaped up as if I had beheld a rainbow in the sky.
'Oh, Jeeves,' I yipped.
'Oh, Jeeves,' yipped Aunt Dahlia, dead heating with me.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“I did a bit more wilting. It seemed to me that I was alone in a deserted smoking-room with a homicidal loony. It is a type of loony I particularly bar, and the homicidal loony I like least is one with a forty-four chest and biceps in proportion. His fingers, I noticed, were twitching, always a bad sign. ‘Oh, for the wings of a dove’ about summed up my feelings as I tried not to look at them.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“Hullo, hullo, hullo!’ she boomed. The old hunting stuff coming to the surface, you notice. ‘Is that you, Bertie, darling?’
I said it was none other.
‘Then what’s the idea, you half-witted Gadarene swine, of all this playing hard-to-get? You and your matter-weighing! I never heard such nonsense in my life. You’ve got to come here, and immediately, if you don’t want an aunt’s curse delivered on your doorstep by return of post. If I have to cope unaided with that ruddy Percy any longer, I shall crack beneath the strain.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“I felt, accordingly, that no matter how vehemently Stilton might express and fulfil himself on discovering me… well, not perhaps exactly cheek by jowl with the woman he loved but certainly hovering in her vicinity, the risk of rousing the fiend within him was one that must be taken. It cannot ever, of course, be agreeable to find yourself torn into a thousand pieces with a fourteen-stone Othello doing a ‘Shuffle off to Buffalo’ on the scattered fragments, but if you are full at the time of Anatole’s Timbale de ris de veau Toulousiane, the discomfort unquestionably becomes modified.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“Wooster!’ he cried, emitting an animal snarl. ‘I didn’t come here to talk about my head, I came to talk about Wooster, the slithery serpent who slinks behind chaps’ backs, stealing fellows’ girls from them. Wooster the home-wrecker! Wooster the snake in the grass from whom no woman is safe! Wooster the modern Don what’s-his-name! You’ve been conducting a clandestine intrigue with him right along. You thought you were fooling me, didn’t you? You thought I didn’t see through your pitiful … your pitiful … Dammit, what’s the word? … your pitiful … No, it’s gone.’
‘I wish you would follow its excellent example.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“As I cleared my throat in order to put this to her, she mastered her emotion sufficiently to be able to speak.
‘Well!’ she said, looking like a female minor prophet about to curse the sins of the people. ‘May I trespass on your valuable time long enough to ask you what in the name of everything bloodsome you think you’re playing at, young pie-faced Bertie? It is now some twenty minutes past one o’clock in the morning, and not a spot of action on your part. Do you expect me to sit up all night waiting for you to get around to a simple, easy task which a crippled child of six could have had all done and washed up in a quarter of an hour? I suppose this is just the shank of the evening to you dissipated Londoners, but we rustics like to get our sleep. What’s the idea? Why the delay? What on earth have you been doing all this while, you revolting young piece of cheese?”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“Bertie,’ she said, after a brief opening speech in the course of which she described me as a lazy young hound who ought to be ashamed to be wallowing in bed on what, if you asked her, was the maddest merriest day of all the glad new year, ‘I’ve just been talking to Jeeves, and if ever a life-saving friend in need drew breath, it is he. Hats off to Jeeves is the way I look at it.’
Pausing for a moment to voice the view that my moustache was an offence against God and man but that she saw in it nothing that a good weed-killer couldn’t cure, she resumed.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“My first emotion on beholding him was one of surprise, a feeling that of all the in-and—out performers I had ever met he was the most unpredictable. I mean, you couldn’t tell from one minute to another what aspect he was going to present to the world, for he switched from Stormy to Set Fair and from Set Fair to Stormy like a barometer with something wrong with its works. At dinner on the previous night he had been all gaiety and effervescence, and here he was now, only a few hours later, once more giving that impersonation of a dead codfish which had caused Aunt Dahlia to take so strong a line with him. Fixing me with lack-lustre eyes, if lack-lustre is the word I want, and wasting no time on preliminary pip-pippings and pourparlers, he started straight off cleansing his bosom of the perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“Gorringe, you ghastly sheep-faced fugitive from Hell,’ she thundered, forgetting, or so I imagine, that she was a hostess, ‘get out of here, blast you! We’re in conference.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“I went to get the cosh, formerly the property of Aunt Agatha’s son, Thos. I have been having trouble of late with Menaces.’
She gazed at me with worshipping eyes, deeply moved.
‘Was it you, my heart of gold,’ she said brokenly, ‘who provided that cosh? I had been putting it down as straight guardian-angel stuff. Oh, Bertie, if ever I called you a brainless poop who ought to be given a scholarship at some good lunatic asylum, I take back the words.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“As I stood there gaping at the closed door, a vision rose before my eyes, featuring me and an inspector of police, the latter having in his supporting cast an unusually nasty-looking sergeant.
‘Are you coming quietly, Wooster?’ the inspector was saying.
‘Who, me?’ I said, quaking in every limb. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Ha, ha,’ laughed the inspector. ‘That’s good. Eh, Fotheringay?’
‘Very rich, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘Makes me chuckle, that does.’
‘Too late to try anything of that sort, my man,’ went on the inspector, becoming grave again. ‘The game is up. We have evidence to prove that you went to this safe and from it abstracted a valuable pearl necklace, the property of Mrs. L.G. Trotter. If that doesn’t mean five years in the jug for you, I miss my bet.’
‘But, honestly, I thought it was Aunt Dahlia’s.’
‘Ha, ha,’ laughed the inspector.
‘Ha, ha,’ chirped the sergeant.
‘A pretty story,’ said the inspector. ‘Tell that to the jury and see what they think of it. Fotheringay, the handcuffs!’
Such was the v. that rose before my e. as I gaped at that c.d., and I wilted like a salted snail. Outside in the garden birds were singing their evensong, and it seemed to me that each individual bird was saying ‘Well, boys, Wooster is for it. We shan’t see much of Wooster for the next few years. Too bad, too bad. A nice chap till he took to crime.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“I can’t explain it,’ she … yes, quavered. I was going to say ‘murmured’, but quavered hits it off better.
L.G. Trotter barked like a seal.
‘I can,’ he said. ‘You’ve been giving money on the sly again to that brother of yours.’
This was the first I had heard of any brother of Ma Trotter’s, but I wasn’t surprised. My experience is that all wives of prosperous business men have shady brothers in the background to whom they slip a bit from time to time.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“Oh!’ cried the shrinking woman, shrinking a bit more, and the spectacle was too much for Percy. All this while he had been sitting tensely where he sat, giving the impression of something stuffed by a good taxidermist, but now, moved by a mother’s distress, he rose rather in the manner of one about to reply to the toast of The Ladies. He was looking a little like a cat in a strange alley which is momentarily expecting a half-brick in the short ribs, but his voice, though low, was firm.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“L.G. Trotter began to speak. As to whether he opened his remarks with the words ‘Ba goom!’ I cannot be positive, but there was a ‘Ba goom!’ implicit in every syllable. The man was what is called beside himself, and one felt a gentle pity for Ma Trotter, little as one liked her. Her reign was over. She had had it. From now on it was plain who was going to be the Fuhrer of the Trotter home. The worm of yesterday — or you might say the worm of ten minutes ago — had become a worm in tiger’s clothing.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“I love you, Percy!’
‘You do?’ His face lit up for an instant. Then there was a black-out. ‘But you’re engaged to Wooster,’ he said moodily, eyeing me in a manner that seemed to suggest that in his opinion it was fellows like me who caused half the trouble in the world.
I moved over to the table and took another slice of toast. Cold, of course, but I rather like cold toast, provided there’s plenty of butter.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“It is from a Mr. Percy Gorringe, sir. Omitting extraneous matter and concentrating on essentials, Mr. Gorringe wishes to borrow a thousand pounds from you.'

I started sharply, causing the soap to shoot from my hand and fall with a dull thud on the fourth mat. With no preliminary warning to soften the shock, his words had momentarily unmanned me. It is not often that one is confronted with ear-biting on so majestic a scale, a fiver till next Wednesday being the normal tariff.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

“– ...Как по-твоему, Вустер, у меня голова как тыква?
– Вовсе нет, старина.
– Не похожа на тыкву?
– Нет, на тыкву не похожа. Может быть, есть что-то от купола Святого Павла, это да.”
― Пелам Гренвилл Вудхаус, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit