“Sober or blotto, this is your motto: keep muddling through.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, quote from A Damsel in Distress
“Lord Marshmoreton: I wish I could get you see my point of view.
George Bevan: I do see your point of view. But dimly. You see, my own takes up such a lot of the foreground”
― P.G. Wodehouse, quote from 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, quote from A Damsel in Distress
“Normally he was fond of most things. He was a good-natured and cheerful young man, who liked life and the great majority of those who lived it contemporaneously with himself. He had no enemies and many friends.
But today he had noticed from the moment he had got out of bed that something was amiss with the world. Either he was in the grip of some divine discontent due to the highly developed condition of his soul, or else he had a grouch. One of the two.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, quote from A Damsel in Distress
“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, quote from A Damsel in Distress
“Hear him now as he toils. He has a long garden-implement in his hand, and he is sending up the death-rate in slug circles with a devastating rapidity. "Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay Ta-ra-ra BOOM—" And the boom is a death-knell. As it rings softly out on the pleasant spring air, another stout slug has made the Great Change.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, quote from A Damsel in Distress
“peculiarity of golf, as of love, that it temporarily changes the natures of its victims;”
― P.G. Wodehouse, quote from A Damsel in Distress
“Like one kissed by a goddess in a dream, he walked on air; and, while one is walking on air, it is easy to overlook the boulders in the path.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, quote from A Damsel in Distress
“The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by a the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract, let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherché movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometime indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales
“There was a new king and his name was pestilence. And he had created a new law - thou shalt do anything to survive.”
― Karen Maitland, quote from Company of Liars
“The wheel of the world swings through the same phases again and again.”
― Rudyard Kipling, quote from The Man Who Would Be King
“Some day soon, reaper, your mouth is going to be the source of your own destruction."
"That does seem likely, doesn’t it?" Tod glanced at me and shrugged. "Until then, it remains a source of my own amusement.”
― Rachel Vincent, quote from With All My Soul
“Maddy ran her hand along the banks of lockers as they walked. She had strolled down this hallway a hundred times before, but now it was different, and it wasn't just the dark. Everything had changed. She came to her locker and paused. She thought about herself at that locker just days ago. That simple comfortable life she'd known for so long.
One day you return to your normal surroundings and everything just feels different, she thought. But the surroundings aren't different. You are.”
― Scott Speer, quote from Immortal City
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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