45 Quotes by Saki

When love is over, how little of love even the lover understands,” quoted Clovis to himself.

I’m living so far beyond my means that we may almost be said to be living apart.

Never,” wrote Reginald to his most darling friend, “be a pioneer. It’s the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion.

It was a fresh rain-repentant afternoon, following a morning that had been sultry and torrentially wet by turns; the sort of afternoon that impels people to talk graciously of the rain as having done a lot of good, its chief merit in their eyes probably having been its recognition of the art of moderation.

I wonder,” said Reginald, “if you have ever walked down the Embankment on a winter night?” “Gracious, no, child! Why do you ask?” “I didn’t; I only wondered. And even your philanthropy, practised in a world where everything is based on competition, must have a debit as well as a credit account. The young ravens cry for food.” “And are fed.” “Exactly. Which presupposes that something else is fed upon.

Susan Mebberley was a charming woman, but she was also an aunt.

It is the penalty and the safeguard of genius that it computes itself by troy weight in a world that measures by vulgar hundredweights.

No one seems to think that there are people who might like to kill their neighbours now and then.

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.