Hector Hugh Munro Quotes
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You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.
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I believe I once considerably scandalized her by declaring that clear soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience.
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The revenge of an elder sister may be long in coming, but, like a South-Eastern express, it arrives in its own good time.
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Why are women so fond of raking up the past? They're as bad as tailors, who invariably remember what you owe them for a suit long after you've ceased to wear it.
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The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, outcast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it paced of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside.
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Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people.
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I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion, he resumed presently. They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.
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In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.
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I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.
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You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood.
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His socks compelled one's attention without losing one's respect.
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To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.
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No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.
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And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.
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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.
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There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay.
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A woman who takes her husband about with her everywhere is like a cat that goes on playing with a mouse long after she's killed it.
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On horseback he seemed to require as many hands as a Hindu god, at least four for clutching the reins, and two more for patting the horse soothingly on the neck.
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The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.
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Monogamy is the Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses.
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He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
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It was one thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its virtue when one practiced it in a tent.
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He seems the incarnation of everything soft and silky and velvety, without a sharp edge in his composition, a dreamer whose philosophy is sleep and let sleep.
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A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.