Hector Hugh Munro Quotes - Page 3

A relative of mine ... spends his time producing improved breeds of sheep and pigs and chickens. So patronising and irritating to teh Almighty, I should think.

Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent.

You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood.

Romance at short notice was her speciality.

No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.

There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets.

The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.

The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other.

When people grow gradually rich their requirements and standard of living expand in proportion, while their present-giving instincts often remain in the undeveloped condition of their earlier days. Something showy and not-too-expensive in a shop is their only conception of the ideal gift.

By insisting on having your bottle pointing to the north when the cork is being drawn, and calling the waiter Max, you may induce an impression on your guests which hours of laboured boasting might be powerless to achieve. For this purpose, however, the guests must be chosen as carefully as the wine.

Whenever a massacre of Armenians is reported from Asia Minor, every one assumes that it has been carried out "under orders" from somewhere or another; no one seems to think that there are people who might like to kill their neighbours now and then.

Mother, may I go and maffick, Tear around and hinder traffic?

The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.

Sherard Blaw, the dramatist who had discovered himself, and who had given so ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world.

I am not collecting copies of the cheaper editions of Omar Khayyám. I gave the last four that I received to the lift-boy, and I like to think of him reading them, with FitzGerald's notes, to his aged mother. Lift-boys always have aged mothers; shows such nice feeling on their part, I think.

Children with Hyacinth's temperament don't know better as they grow older; they merely know more.

If he had unlimited money at his disposal, he might go into the wilds somewhere and shoot big game. I never know what the big game have done to deserve it, but they do help to deflect the destructive energies of some of our social misfits.

There are certain fixed rules that one observes for one's own comfort. For instance, never be flippantly rude to any inoffensive grey-bearded stranger that you may meet in pine forests or hotel smoking-rooms on the Continent. It always turns out to be the King of Sweden.

A beautifully constructed borshch, such as you are going to experience presently, ought not only to banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought.

He spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is not true it has been found necessary to invent it.

I hate babies. They're so human.

The man is a common murderer. A common murderer, possible, but a very uncommon cook.

Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage.

People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.

It is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the average female relative in the country.