Evelyn Waugh

“The fines!” said Mr. Sniggs, gently rubbing his pipe along the side of his nose. “Oh, my! the fines there’ll be after this evening!”

It was clearly going to be a bad crossing.

“Well, that saves a great deal of trouble. I am glad, Sniggs; I am, really. What a lot of clothes the young man appears to have lost!”

Nothing is too much trouble, darling, you know that.

I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal.

Nothing so beastly as a beastly crossing, is there?

We schoolmasters must temper discretion with deceit.

Don’t stand there wiggling your behind at me.

“Women are an enigma,” said Grimes, “as far as Grimes is concerned.”

“What an extraordinary coincidence. Are you sure you do?”

“Oh, shut up,” said Paul.

It is so depressing to be in a profession in which literally all conversation is “shop.”

“Frankly, I deplore the whole business.”

For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.

Shopping with Dingy is not a seemly occupation for a public-school man.

I don’t believe there is such a person.

“Serious accusation, fiddlesticks! What he wants is a jolly good hidin’.”

Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else

“Oh, why did nobody warn me?” cried Grimes in his agony.

Poor Mr. Outrage, thought Mr. Outrage; poor, poor old Outrage, always just on the verge of revelation, of some sublime and transfiguring experience; always frustrated.