Great Throughts Treasury

"A trouble shared is a trouble halved."

"Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age. "

"The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless. "

"While time lasts there will always be a future, and that future will hold both good and evil, since the world is made to that mingled pattern. "

"A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought."

"A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. Well, said the man, I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing. I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also."

"A human being must have occupation, of he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world."

"A continual atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven't got any of your own."

"A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity."

"And upon his return, Gherkins, who had always considered his uncle as a very top-hatted sort of person, actually saw him take from his handkerchief-drawer an undeniable automatic pistol. It was at this point that Lord Peter was apotheosed from the state of Quite Decent Uncle to that of Glorified Uncle"

"And what do all the great words come to in the end, but that? I love you- I am at rest with you- I have come home."

"And you, Mary, if you must run off to London, why do it in that unfinished manner, so that I was left without the car, and couldn't catch anything until the midnight train at Northallerton? It's so much better to do things neatly and properly, even stupid things."

"As I grow older and older, And totter toward the tomb, I find that I care less and less, Who goes to bed with whom."

"As we cannot afford to squander our natural resources of minerals, food, and beauty, so we cannot afford to discard any human resources of brains, skills, and initiative, even though it is women who possess them...a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual."

"At twenty years of age, the old-fashioned schooling turned me out helpless, ignorant and dissatisfied. Forty years later I encounter the product of the new schooling — still more helpless, still more ignorant, and possibly not even dissatisfied."

"Books, you know, Charles, are like lobster-shells. We surround ourselves with 'em, and then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."

"All the children seem to be coming out quite intelligent, thank goodness. It would have been such a bore to be the mother of morons, and it’s an absolute toss-up, isn’t it? If one could only invent them, like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to a well-regulated mind."

"And then, at night, the lit lamp and the drawn curtain, with the flutter of the turned page and soft scrape of pen on paper the only sounds to break the silence between quarter- and quarter-chime."

"And by the way, my dear,' he said, 'you might just mention to Mrs. Sutton that if she must read the morning paper before I come down, I should be obliged if she would fold it neatly afterwards.' 'What an old fuss-box you are, darling,' said his wife. Mr. Mummery sighed. He could not explain that it was somehow important that the morning paper should come to him fresh and prim, like a virgin. Women did not feel these things. (Suspicion)"

"Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."

"Bunter: I assure your lordship that for the firsttime in my existence I regret that I have made no practical study of campanology. Wimsey: I am always so delighted to find that there are things you cannot do."

"But -- my dear, my heart is BROKEN! I have seen the perfect Peter Wimsey. Height, voice, charm, smile, manner, outline of features, everything -- and he is -- THE CHAPLAIN OF BALLIOL!! What is the use of anything?... I am absolutely shattered by this Balliol business. Such waste -- why couldn't he have been an actor?"

"But it is the mark of all movements, however well-intentioned, that their pioneers tend, by much lashing of themselves into excitement, to lose sight of the obvious."

"But suppose one doesn't quite know which one wants to put first. Suppose, said Harriet, falling back on words which were not her own, suppose one is cursed with both a heart and a brain? You can usually tell, said Miss de Vine, by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I'm quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is."

"But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds."

"But to Lord Peter the world presented itself as an entertaining labyrinth of side-issues"

"Can I have the heart to fluster the flustered Thipps further—that's very difficult to say quickly—by appearing in a top-hat and frock-coat? I think not. Ten to one he will overlook my trousers and mistake me for the undertaker. A grey suit, I fancy, neat but not gaudy, with a hat to tone, suits my other self better. Exit the amateur of first editions; new motive introduced by solo bassoon; enter Sherlock Holmes, disguised as a walking gentleman."

"Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject."

"Do you find it easy to get drunk on words? So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober."

"Don't be so damned discouraging, said Wimsey. I have already carefully explained to you that this time I am investigating this business. Anybody would think you had no confidence in me. People have been wrongly condemned before now. Exactly; simply because I wasn't there. I never thought of that."

"Even idiots occasionally speak the truth accidentally."

"Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him."

"Every woman is a human being-one cannot repeat that too often-and a human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world."

"Everybody is, I suppose, either Classic or Gothic by nature. Either you feel in your bones that buildings should be rectangular boxes with lids to them, or you are moved to the marrow by walls that climb and branch, and break into a inflorescence of pinnacles."

"Experience has taught me, said Peter... that no situation finds Bunter unprepared. That he should have procured The Times this morning by the simple expedient of asking the milkman to request the postmistress to telephone to Broxford and have it handed to the 'bus-conductor to be dropped at the post-office and brought up by the little girl who delivers the telegrams is a trifling example of his resourceful energy."

"For God's sake, let's take the word 'possess' and put a brick round its neck and drown it ... We can't possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have."

"Harriet was silent. She suddenly saw Wimsey in a new light. She knew him to be intelligent, clean, courteous, wealthy, well-read, amusing and enamored, but he had not so far produced in her that crushing sense of utter inferiority which leads to prostration and hero-worship. But she now realised that there was, after all, something god-like about him. He could control a horse."

"Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?"

"He had outlived the luxurious agonies of youthful blood, and in this very freedom from illusion he recognized the loss of something. From now on, every hour of light-heartedness would be, not a prerogative but an achievement - one more axe or case-bottle or fowling-piece, rescued, Crusoe-fashion, from a sinking ship."

"He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed -- a kind of amiable absurdity."

"He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart. Mr. Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain."

"He was being about as protective as a can-opener."

"Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it."

"Here am I, sweating my brains out to introduce a really sensational incident into your dull and disreputable little police investigation, and you refuse to show a single spark of enthusiasm."

"Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain; If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!"

"His [Lord Peter's] long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola."

"How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do. Except to teach me for the first time what they meant."

"How fleeting are all worldly passions when compared with the massive continuity of ducks."

"However entrancing it is to wander unchecked through a garden of bright images, are we not enticing your mind from another subject of almost equal importance?"

"I always have a quotation for everything--it saves original thinking."