Wholesome pessimism

 Among the compensations of advancing age is a wholesome pessimism, which, while it takes the fine edge off whatever triumphs may come to us, had the admirable effect of preventing Fate from working off on us any of those gold bricks, coins with strings attached, and unhatched chickens at which Ardent Youth snatches with such enthusiasm, to its subsequent disappointment. As we emerge from the twenties we grow into a habit of mind which looks askance at Fate bearing gifts. We miss, perhaps, the occasional prize, but we also avoid leaping light-heartedly into traps.

(from Something Fresh, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Persecution at Muldoon's

     All through dinner he brooded upon Ashe's defiance and the horrors which were to result from that defiance. One of Mr. Peters' most painful memories was of a two weeks' visit which he had once paid to Mr. William Muldoon at his celebrated health-restoring estaglishment at White Plains in the state of New York. He had been persuaded to go there by a brother-millionaire whom till then he had always regarded as a friend. The memory of Mr. Muldoon's cold shower-baths and brisk system of physical exercise still lingered.

    The thought that under Ashe's rule he was to go through privately very much what he had gone through in the company of a gang of other unfortunates at Muldoon's froze him with horror. He knew these health-cranks who believed that all mortal ailments could be cured by cold showers and brisk walks. They were all alike, and they nearly killed you.

(from Something Fresh, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Levels in the mansion

 Probably the lower servants in the Servants' Hall discussed the upper servants in the Steward's Room, and the still lower servants in the housemaids' sitting-room discussed their superiors of the Servants' Hall, and the still-room group gossiped about the housemaids' sitting-room. He wondered which was the bottom circle of all, and came to the conclusion that it was probably represented by the small respectdful boy who had acted as his guide a short while before. This boy, having nobody to discuss anybody with, presumably sat in solitary meditation, brooding on the odd-job man.

(from Something Fresh, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Haughty vegetables?

 Of Mrs. Twemlow little need be attempted in the way of pen-portraiture beyond the statement that she went as harmoniously with Mr. Beach as one of a pair of vases or one of a brace of pheasants goes with its fellow. She had the same appearance of imminent apoplexy, the same air of belonging to some dignified and haughty branch of the vegetable kingdom.

(from Something Fresh, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

The tie will do it every time

     It was plain to Ashe that his employer was in no sunny mood. There are few things less calculated to engender sunniness in a naturally bad-tempered man than a dress-tie which will not let itself be pulled and twisted into the right shape. Even when things went well, Mr. Peters hated dressing for dinner. Words cannot describe his feelings when they went wrong.

    There is something to be said in excuse for this impatience. It is a hollow mockery to be obliged to deck one's person as for a feast, when that feast is to consist of a little asparague and a few nuts.

(from Something Fresh, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

That fellow is odd

 A curious species of mutual toleration - it could hardly be dignified by the title of friendship - had sprung up between these two men, so opposite in practically every respect. Each regarded the other with that feeling of perpetual amazement with which we encounter those whose whole viewpoint and mode of life is foreign to our own. The American's force and nervous energy fascinated Lord Emsworth. In a purely detached way Lord Emsworth liked force and nervous energy. They interested him. He was glad he did not possess them himself, but he enjoyed them as a spectacle just as a man who would not like to be a purple cow may have no objection to seeing one. As for Mr. Peters, nothing like the earl had ever happened to him before in a long and varied life. He had seen men and cities, but Lord Emsworth was something new. Each, in fact, was to the other a perpetual freak-show with no charge for admission.

(from Something Fresh, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

A conveniently short memory

 Wafted through the sun-lit streets in his taxi-cab, the Earl of Emsworth smiled benevolently upon London's teeming millions. He was as completely happy as only a fluffy-minded old man with excellent health and a large income can be. Other people worried about all sorts of things - strikes, wars, suffragettes, diminishing birth-rates, the growing materialism of the age, and a score of similar subjects. Worrying, indeed, seemed to be the twentieth century's specialty. Lord Emsworth never worried. Nature had equipped him with a mind so admirably constructed for withstanding the disagreeableness of life that, if an unpleasant thought entered it, it passed out again a moment later. Except for a few of Life's fundamental facts, such as that his cheque-bok was in the right-hand top drawer of his desk, that the Honourable Freddie Threepwood was a young idiot who required perpetual restraint, and that, when in doubt about anything, he had merely to apply to his secretary, Rupert Baxter - except for these basic things, he never remembered anything for more than a few minutes.

(from Something Fresh, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

In other words, suckers

R. Jones was about fifty years old, grey-haired, of a mauve complexion, jovial among his friends, and perhaps even more jovial with chance acquaintances. It was estimated by envious intimates that his joviality with chance acquaintances, especially with young men of the upper classes with large purses and small foreheads was worth hundreds of pounds a year to him. There was something about his comfortable appearance and his jolly manner which irresistibly attracted a certain type of young man. It was his good fortune that this type of young man should be the type, financially, most worth attracting.

The Mysterious Mr. R. Jones

     As a matter of fact, these speculations had passed through suspicious minds at Scotland Yard, which had for some time taken not a little interest in R. Jones. But, beyond ascertaining that he bought and sold curios, did a certain amount of book-making during the flat-racing season, and had been known to lend money, Scotland Yard did not find out much about Mr. Jones, and presently dismissed him from its thoughts. Not that Scotland Yard was satisfied. To a certain extent, baffled would be a better description of its attitude. The suspicion that R. Jones was, among other things, a receiver of stolen goods still lingered, but proof was not forthcoming.

    R. Jones saw to that. He did a great many things, for he was one of the busiest men in London; but what he did best was seeing to it that proof was not forthcoming.

(from Something Fresh, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Must have been right entertaining

     Larsen's Exercises are the last word in exercises. They bring in to play every sinew of the body. They promote a brisk circulation. They enable you, if you persevere, to fell oxen, if desired, with a single blow.

    But they are not dignified. Indeed, to one seeing them suddenly and without warning for the first time, they are markedly humorous. The only reason why King Henry of England, whose son sank with the White Ship, never smiled again, was because Lieutenant Larsen had not then invented his admirable Exercises.

(from Something Fresh, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

A thoroughly bad man

There were those who said that Yaqui Joe's father had been an Irishman, but his name was taken from his mother in the mountains of Sonora. He had been an outlaw by nature and by choice from the time he could crawl, and he was minus a finger on his left hand, and had a notch in the top of his ear. The bullet that had so narrowly missed his skull had been fired by a man who never missed again. He was buried in a hasty grave somewhere in the Mogollons.

(from  "In Victorio's Country," by Louis L'Amour)

Loud or soft, they sting

     It was Mr. Slattery who for the next few minutes monopolized the conversation. In a stream of well-selected words his opinion of his friend's duplicity rumbled hollowly through the room. The occasion was one when the orator would have prefered to express himself at the full capacity of his lungs, but the circumstances of the encounter precluded that.

    Even when whispered, however, Mr. Slattery's remarks were effective. After all, when you are calling a man a low-down, horn-swoggling, double-crossing skunk, it is the actual words that count, not the volume of sound.

(from Hot Water, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Caught with the goods

     One of the hollowest laughs that had ever been heard on the terrace of the Chateau Blissac broke gratingly upon the afternoon stillness.

    "Oh, no. There's nothing the matter. Nothing whatever. Except that when Mrs. Gedge was in Paris she saw fifty-seven varieties of photographs of the real Vicomte de Blissac and she looked out of the window just now and saw you and said, 'Who's that piece of cheese?' and I said, 'That's the Vicomte,' and she said, 'My left foot it's the Vicomte.' And she's send me out here to fetch you in and explain. Outside of that, everything's fine."

(from Hot Water, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Not his sort

 Now that the girl had come closer, Mr. Gedge was able to see that, though beautiful, she was not altogether the sort of girl he would have cared to be left alone with for long. There was that about her which would have rendered any male uneasy. In her lustrous eyes he observed a look which he had sometimes detected in those of his wife - the look that spells trouble. If she had come to St. Rocque to meet some member of his own sex, he did not envy that member.

(from Hot Water, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)