Piccadilly Jim Quotes

“You would be miserable if you had to go through life with a human doormat with 'Welcome' written on him. You want some one made of sterner stuff. You want, as it were, a sparring-partner, some one with whom you can quarrel happily with the certain knowledge that he will not curl up in a ball for you to kick, but will be there with the return wallop.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“In his normal state he would not strike a lamb. I’ve known him to do it’
‘Do what?’
‘Not strike lambs”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“She was at the valiant age when we burn to right wrongs and succour the oppressed,”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“I am going to start at the bottom and work my way still further down.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“Mr Pett, receiving her cold glance squarely between the eyes, felt as if he were being disembowelled by a clumsy amateur.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“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 back yard bears itself with less jauntiness than a man faced by such a prospect.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“You never know what is waiting for you around the corner. You start the day with the fairest prospects, and before nightfall everything is as rocky and ding-basted as stig tossed full of doodlegammon.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“Even from an aesthetic point of view the sight of the bulging child offended him. Ogden Ford was round and blobby and looked overfed. He had the plethoric habit of one to whom wholesome exercise is a stranger and the sallow complexion of the confirmed candy-fiend. Even now, a bare half hour after breakfast, his jaws were moving with a rhythmical, champing motion. “What are you eating, boy?” demanded Mr. Pett, his disappointment turning to irritability. “Candy.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim: P.G. Wodehouse's Famous Classic Novel all Time: Fiction, Humorous - P.G. Wodehouse's Hilarious Classic: Embarking on the Adventure of Piccadilly ... G Woodhouse's Famous Classic Novel all Time

“There are moments in the life of every man when the impulse attacks him to sacrifice his future to the alluring gratification of the present.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“You start the day with the fairest prospects, and before nightfall everything is as rocky and ding-basted as stig tossed full of doodlegammon.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“You know, Bayliss," said Jimmy thoughtfully, rolling over on the couch, "life is peculiar, not to say odd. You never know what is waiting for you round the corner. You start the day with the fairest prospects, and before nightfall everything is as rocky and ding-basted as stig tossed full of doodlegammon.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“Bayliss resumed reading. He was one of those readers who, whether their subject be a murder case or funny anecdote, adopt a measured and sepulchral delivery which gives a suggestion of tragedy and horror to whatever they read. At the church he attended, children would turn pale and snuggle up to their mothers when he read.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“They have undoubtedly come to a bad end by this time. If bears were sent to attend to the children who criticised Elijah, your little friends were in line for a troupe of tigers. But there were some of a finer fibre? There were a few who didn't call you Carrots?”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“perceived the numbing truth that we human beings are merely as many pieces in a jig-saw puzzle and that our every movement affects the fortunes of some other piece. Just so, faintly at first and taking shape by degrees, must the germ of civic spirit have come to Prehistoric Man. We are all individualists till we wake up.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“Mr. Crocker was swallowing convulsively, as if testing his larynx with a view to speech. Like Saul of Tarsus, he had been stricken dumb by the sudden bright light which his wife's words had caused to flash upon him.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“He alluded in feeling terms to the Providence which watches over good young men and saves them from the blighting necessity of offering themselves in the flower of their golden youth as human sacrifices to the Moloch of capitalistic greed: and, having commiserated with his guests in that a similar stroke of luck had not happened to each of them, advised them to drown their sorrows in drink.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“Mrs. Pett, like most other people, subconsciously held the view that the ruder a person is the more efficient he must be. It is but rarely that any one is found who is not dazzled by the glamour of incivility.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“Mr. Chester, standing near the door with Ann, eyed the assemblage with the genial contempt of a large dog for a voluble pack of small ones.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“At different spots in the room stood the six resident geniuses to whose presence in the home Mr. Pett had such strong objections, and in addition to these she had collected so many more of a like breed from the environs of Washington Square that the air was clamorous with the hoarse cries of futurist painters, esoteric Buddhists, vers libre poets, interior decorators, and stage reformers, sifted in among the more conventional members of society who had come to listen to them. Men with new religions drank tea with women with new hats. Apostles of Free Love expounded their doctrines to persons who had been practising them for years without realising it. All over the room throats were being strained and minds broadened.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“It was a sticky wicket yesterday, sir, owing to the rain." "Eh?" "The wicket was sticky, sir." "Come again." "I mean that the reason why the game yesterday struck you as slow was that the wicket—I should say the turf—was sticky—that is to say wet. Sticky is the technical term, sir. When the wicket is sticky, the batsmen are obliged to exercise a great deal of caution, as the stickiness of the wicket enables the bowlers to make the ball turn more sharply in either direction as it strikes the turf than when the wicket is not sticky.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“Celestine had been born Maggie O'Toole, a name which Mrs. Pett stoutly refused to countenance in any maid of hers.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“No Adonis to begin with, he had been so edited and re-edited during a long and prosperous ring career by the gloved fists of a hundred foes that in affairs of the heart he was obliged to rely exclusively on moral worth and charm of manner.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim

“The residence of Mr. Peter Pett, the well-known financier, on Riverside Drive is one of the leading eyesores of that breezy and expensive boulevard. As you pass by in your limousine, or while enjoying ten cents worth of fresh air on top of a green omnibus, it jumps out and bites at you. Architects, confronted with it, reel and throw up their hands defensively, and even the lay observer has a sense of shock. The place resembles in almost equal proportions a cathedral, a suburban villa, a hotel and a Chinese pagoda. Many of its windows are of stained glass, and above the porch stand two terra-cotta lions, considerably more repulsive even than the complacent animals which guard New York's Public Library.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim