Edmund Clerihew Bentley

"Lord Southrop was, of course, eccentric in his views; and you never knew — here the housekeeper, with a despondent head-shake, paused, leaving unspoken the suggestion that a man who did not think or b…"

"You may as well know, Philip — you'll soon find out, anyhow — the truth is she will flirt with any man that she doesn't actively dislike. She's so brimful of life she can't hold herself in — or she wo…"

"'Many young women of twenty-six in these days could face such an ordeal, I suppose. I have observed a sort of imitative hardness about the products of the higher education of women today which would c…"

"As he went through the half-darkness of the lamp-lit streets, deserted almost entirely at this hour, he brooded over his hard luck. What chance had he ever been given? Raught, for that matter, like ma…"

"There are some places which, seen for the first time, yet seem to strike a chord of recollection. "I have been here before," we think to ourselves, "and this is one of my true homes." It is no mystery…"

"Is it a cosmic law, d'you think, that conceited men's hats are always too small?"

"I can only say that you must have totally renounced all trust in the operations of the human reason; an attitude which, while it is bad Christianity and also infernal nonsense, is oddly enough bad Pos…"

"'What do you mean by "a man like me"?' he demanded with a sort of fierceness. 'Do you take me for a man without any normal instincts? I don't say you impress people as a simple, transparent sort of ch…"