Frasi di Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

pagina 4

“I gatti, come categoria, non hanno mai completamente superato il complesso di superiorità dovuto al fatto che, nell'antico Egitto, erano adorati come dei.”

“Se le donne comprendessero le proprie responsabilità baderebbero bene a sorridere; tanto bene che probabilmente non lo farebbero.”

“Vi sono nella vita di un uomo momenti in cui il sorriso di una donna può avere risultati importanti quanto quelli di una esplosione di dinamite.”

“C'è qualcosa, nel modo in cui la primavera si manifesta in Inghilterra, che mi ricorda un cucciolo timido che cerca di farsi degli amici. Fa un avventato passo avanti, se la svigna terrorizzato, poi striscia di nuovo in avanti, timoroso, e infine, acquistata fiducia, si avventa con impeto e gioia.”

“Uno dei deliziosi aspetti della primavera inglese è che ha dei giorni, anzi, è quasi del tutto composta di giorni in cui, al tramonto, la temperatura è tale da rendere gradevole un fuoco, anzi persino necessario.”

“Era una bella mattinata. Si è già parlato dell'insensibilità della Natura nei momenti di umana sofferenza; basterà dire che in tale occasione la Natura era più che all'altezza della sua reputazione.”

“Il cammino del progresso ha tolto a Waterloo Station i suoi misteri. Un tempo era stato uno strano, oscuro Paese delle meraviglie in cui Alici spaurite e i loro corrispettivi maschili vagavano disperati, chiedendo informazioni a funzionari altrettanto ignari e sperduti: ora invece era ordinata ed efficiente.”

“Il ritorno del figliol prodigo è quasi proverbialmente legato a effervescenti manifestazioni di gioia da parte dell'intera compagnia con, forse, la sola eccezione del vitello ingrassato.”

“Placida, stolida, assorta nelle sue faccende e titanicamente indifferente a tutto il resto, Londra si avviava al suo tran tran quotidiano. Da Putney a Sloane Square, da Cricklewood a Regent Street, da Sydenham Hill allo Strand, da qualsiasi posto a qualsiasi altro posto, autobus rossi, gialli e marroni passavano rombando di continuo. I vigili vigilavano, gli agenti di borsa badavano alla borsa, i mendicanti mendicavano, i cappellai smerciavano cappelli, i poltroni poltrivano, i venditori di ghette vendevano ghette, i giornalai strillavano l'edizione delle tre dei giornali del pomeriggio, e i colonnelli in pensione sedevano comodamente alle finestre dei club di fronte a Piccadilly e Pall Mall, sognando il pranzo.”

“Il grande segreto dell'eterna giovinezza: far sempre circolare la bottiglia e non andare mai a letto prima delle quattro del mattino.”

“Anna parlava allegramente del più e del meno e io tacevo, perché la mia anima non era che un cumulo di emozioni ribollenti.”

“Di tutte le cure intese a guarire un uomo da riflessioni malinconiche, quella di più immediata efficacia consiste in un colpo violento al plesso solare. Esempi antichi e recenti ce lo dimostrano.”

“Le fandonie, come tu le chiami, mentre io le definisco la modellazione artistica della verità, le fandonie, dunque, sono… come dirò?”

“It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.”

“One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.”

“It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins.”

“No one so dislikes being punished unjustly as the person who might have been punished justly on scores of previous occasions, if he had only been found out.”

“Providence looks after all the chumps of this world, and personally, I'm all for it.”

“[He] saw that a peculiar expression had come into his nephew's face; an expression a little like that of a young hindu fakir who having settled himself on his first bed of spikes is beginning to wish that he had chosen one of the easier religions.”

“everything is relative. you, for instance, are my relative.”

“The ideas of debtor and creditor as to what constitutes a good time never coincide.”

“When you're alone you don't do much laughing.”

“She looked like something that might have occured to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.”

“This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.”

“It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.”

“The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness.”

“Well, you certainly are the most wonderfully woolly baa-lamb that ever stepped.”

“Woman is the unfathomable, incalculable mystery, the problem that we men can never hope to solve.”

“It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.”

“When you have just been told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.”

“Golf… is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well.”

“I suppose he must have taken about a nine or something in hats. Shows what a rotten thing it is to let your brain develop too much.”

“Say what you will, there is something fine about our old aristocracy. I'll bet Trotsky couldn't hit a moving secretary with an egg on a dark night.”

“It isn't often that Aunt Dahlia, lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.”

“Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.”

“The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.”

“What a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean.”

“There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action.”

“A girl who bonnets a policeman with an ashcan full of bottles is obviously good wife-and-mother timber.”

“He looked haggard and careworn, like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to shove cyanide in the consommé, and the dinner-gong due any moment.”

“One prefers, of course, on all occasions to be stainless and above reproach, but, failing that, the next best thing is unquestionably to have got rid of the body.”

“Like so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.”