“He’s simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.”
— Saki
“Oysters are more beautiful than any religion . . . there’s nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.”
— Saki
“Sherard Blaw the dramatist who had discovered himself and who had given so unstintingly of his discovery to the world.”
— Saki
“In baiting a mousetrap with cheese always leave room for the mouse.”
— Saki
“A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanations.”
— Saki
“The young man turned to him with a disarming candour which instantly put him on his guard.”
— Saki
“The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.”
— Saki
“Hating anything in the way of ill-natured gossip ourselves we are always grateful to those who do it for us and do it well.”
— Saki
“The clock struck eleven with the respectful unobtrusiveness of one whose mission in life is to be ignored.”
— Saki
“The English have a proverb, ‘Conscience makes cowboys of us all’.”
— Saki
“To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.”
— Saki
“Clovis believed that if a lie was worth telling it was worth telling well.”
— Saki
“Miles away, down through an opening in the hills, he could catch glimpses of a road where motor-cars sometimes passed, and yet here, so removed from the arteries of the latest civilization, was a bat-haunted old homestead, where something unmistakably like witchcraft seemed to hold a very practical sway.”
— Saki
“Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.”
— Saki
“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.”
— Saki
“Well in those parts (upcountry India) they have were-tigers, or think they have, and I must say that in this case, so far as sworn and uncontested evidence went, they had every ground for thinking so. However, as we gave up witchcraft prosecutions about three hundred years ago, we don’t like to have other people keeping on our discarded practices; it doesn’t seem respectful to our mental and moral position.”
— Saki
“It follows that they never understood Reginald, who came down late to breakfast, and nibbled toast, and said disrespectful things about the universe. The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast.”
— Saki
“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.”
— Saki
“Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.”
— Saki
“This story has no moral. If it points out an evil at any rate it suggests no remedy.”
— Saki
“The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.”
— Saki
“Never be a pioneer. It’s the early Christian that gets the fattest lion.”
— Saki
“The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.”
— Saki
“I’m living so far beyond my means that we may almost be said to be living apart.”
— Saki
“I think she might at least have waited till the funeral was over,’ said Amanda in a scandalized voice.’It’s her own funeral, you know,’ said Sir Lulworth; ‘it’s a nice point in etiquette how far one ought to show respect to one’s own mortal remains.’ (“Laura”)”
— Saki