Sublime

His idea of female beauty was a woman so fat if you slapped her backside in the morning she’d still be jiggling when you got back home for dinner.

Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it’s the safe side for madness to dip on.

‘Are the broads loose in Scotland?’ Naturally, I had to make her repeat it because I could not quite believe my ears, but I had heard right the first time. Her problem was her husband was off to Scotland, and she was anxious he should come back with the knowledge not of what Scotsmen wore under the kilts, but rather their lassies.

At the time when I went to Mme. Swann's the Dreyfus storm had not yet broken, and some of the more prominent Jews were extremely powerful. None more so than Sir Rufus Israels, whose wife, Lady Israels, was Swann's aunt.

the Marquis de Norpois?

She had no grace or charm whatsoever. She had noncharm, or anticharm. A bottomless well of antagonism and hostility. And she was terrifically ugly.

“Hot dogs, ladies?” Ignatius asked pleasantly.

a lady of admirable good-nature and good temper, much liked by every one who knew her, and of those ample architectural proportions that in women who are not duchesses are described by contemporary historians as stoutness.

as Saki once put it, ‘a little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation’,