The Square Egg, and Other Sketches, by Saki

“How well he reads our sex,” murmured Mrs Gramplain, “and yet how badly he plays bridge!”

“There is one character in fiction one hears no end of, but no one has ever seen her represented in portrait or in the flesh.”

“Once again Duncombe experienced the uncomfortable certainty of being face to face with a tragedy whose nature he could not guess at.”

“The camel is old—horribly, mustily old—and it is difficult to conceive that it has ever been anything else.”

“‘I laid a trap for you; I told you that I had never met Mrs. Saltpen-Jago. As a matter of fact I met her at lunch on Monday last. She is a pronounced blonde.'”

“‘It seems there is just one way out of the tangle. He's inclined to be amorous.'”

“‘We can't keep shifting Mr. Chermbacon backwards and forwards as though he was the regulator of an erratic clock.'”

“‘As your mother says, you are a mass of selfishness.'”

“Yealmton and his wife waged a politely reticent warfare; it was a struggle which Thirza knew she must ultimately win, because she was fighting for existence.”

“How long would she struggle in those unfathomed weed-grown depths before she lay as picturesquely still as the drowned heroine of her tale-weavings?”

“In Burma it is possible to be a politician without ceasing to be a philosopher.”

“Most of those terms are probably wrong, but a little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.”

“To the average modern Russian a desire to visit Pskoff is an inexplicable mental freak on the part of a foreigner who wishes to see something of the country he is living in.”

“It is, indeed, no small triumph to have combined the untrammelled liberty of primeval savagery with the luxury which only a highly developed civilization can command.”

“Bidderdale's attention was caught by an item on a loose sheet of agenda paper: ‘Vote on account of special Hells.'”

“It takes all sorts to make a sex.”

“The lark would suddenly dash skyward and pour forth a song of ecstatic jubilation that sounded horribly forced and insincere.”

“Much more to be thought about than the enemy over yonder or the war all over Europe is the mud of the moment.”