Welcome to my commonplace blog

The goal of this blog is to preserve a few ideas and quotes from books I read. In the old days when books were not so readily available, people kept "commonplace books" where they copied choice passages they wanted to be able to remember and perhaps reuse. The idea got picked up by V.F.D. and it's common knowledge that most of that organization's volunteers have kept commonplace books, and so have Laura and I.

I'm sure there are many other Internet sites and blogs dedicated to the same idea. But this one is mine. Feel free to look around and leave comments, but not spam.

16 August 2010

The Adventures of Sally (P. G. Wodehouse)

This is not as funny as the Jeeves books, probably because the heroine here is a nice, honest person. :-) But it is Wodehouse. This book is out of copyright, so should be available in the usual places for free.


Quotes:

Of all outdoor sports, few are more stimulating than watching middle-aged Frenchmen bathe.

Fillmore--Gerald--all of them. There might be a woman in each of their lives, but she came second--an afterthought--a thing for their spare time. Gerald was everything to her. His success would never be more than a side-issue as far as she was concerned. He himself, without any of the trappings of success, was enough for her. But she was not enough for him.

Here was an estimable young man, obviously the sort of young man who would always have to be assisted through life by his relatives, and she had deliberately egged him on to wreck his prospects.

Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry. Sally, grab a chump. Tap his forehead first, and if it rings solid, don't hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from the husband having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him.

If one could manage one's own life as well as one can manage other people's!

The trouble is, it seems, that about once in every thirty years a sort of craze for change comes over London, and they paint a shop-front red instead of blue, and that upsets the returned exile dreadfully.

I felt like a small lion in a den of Daniels.

And quietly and methodically, like a respectable wolf settling on the trail of a Red Riding Hood, he prepared to pursue.

She had always disliked Bruce Carmyle's hands. They were strong and bony and black hair grew on the back of them.

Bruce Carmyle gave it up, and lit a moody cigarette. He was oppressed by that feeling which so many of us have felt in our time, that it was all wrong.

No comments:

Post a Comment