Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.

She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.

Birds, except when broiled and in the society of a cold bottle, bored him stiff.

Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.

Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.

I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning. The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing to be looked at only when the sun is high and the world full of warmth and optimism.

Well, you know what the Fulham Road's like. If your top-hat blows off into it, it has about as much chance as a rabbit at a dogshow.