davidkern:

I have decided something this summer.

Well, actually, I have come to an opinion and I came to it last night: no author is more suited to joyful summer reading than P.G. Wodehouse.

His use of language is so uncommonly playful, his characters so incomparably ridiculous, and his wisdom so…

I like a man to be a clean, strong, upstanding Englishman who can look his gnu in the face and put an ounce of lead in it.

Mr Mulliner Speaking (1929)

“Although nobody who had met him was likely to get George Cyril Wellbeloved confused with the poet Keats, it was extraordinary on what similar lines the two men’s minds worked. “Oh, for a beaker of the warm South, full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene!” sang Keats, licking his lips, and “Oh, for a mug of beer, with, if possible, a spot of gin in it!” sighed George Cyril Wellbeloved, licking his; and in quest of the elixir he had visited in turn the Emsworth Arms, the Wheatsheaf, the Waggoner’s Rest, the Beetle and Wedge, the Stitch in Time, the Jolly Cricketers and all the other hostelries at which Market Blandings pointed with so much pride. 
But everywhere the story was the same. Barmaids had been given their instructions, pot boys warned to be on the alert. They had placed at his disposal gingerbeer, ginger ale, sarsaparilla, lime juice and on one occasion milk, but his request for the cup that clears today of past regrets and future fears was met with a firm nolle prosequi . Staunch and incorruptible, the barmaids and the pot boys refused to serve him with anything that would have interested Omar Khayyam, and he had come away parched and saddened.”

`Do you know,’ said a thoughtful Bean, `I’ll bet that if all the girls Freddie Widgeon has loved and lost were placed end to end - not that I suppose one could do it - they would reach halfway down Piccadilly.’ `Further than that,’ said the Egg. `Some of them were pretty tall.’

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

Sally (1920)

“One of those ghastly literary lunches…. This one was to honour Emma Lucille Agee who wrote that dirty novel that’s been selling in millions in America… About fifteen of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.”

The Girl in Blue (1970)

Mrs. Wardle served Augustine Mulliner what she referred to as “a nice fried egg.”

“And what pray, do you mean by nice? It may be an amiable egg. It may be a civil, well-meaning egg. But if you think it is fit for human consumption, adjust that impression. Go back to your kitchen, woman; select another; and remember this time that you are a cook, not an incinerating machine. Between an egg that is fried and an egg that is cremated there is a wide and substantial difference.”

‎”Every young man starting life ought to know how to cope with an angry swan, I I will briefly relate the proper procedure. You begin by picking up the raincoat which somebody has dropped; and then, judging the distance to a nicety, you simply shove the raincoat over the bird’s head; and taking the boat-hook which you have prudently brought with you, you insert it underneath the swan and heave. The swan goes into a bush and starts trying to unscramble itself; and you saunter back to your boat, taking with you any friends who happen at the moment to be sitting on roofs in the vicinity.”

Jeeves and the Impending Doom