British Humor Quotes

“What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?”
― Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

“Of the seminal moments in my life, Careers Day in the autumn of Year 5 is my favorite. Everyone had to dress as whatever they wanted to be once they grew up. I had gone in a tweed jacket and a bow tie, and when Miss Weston asked me what I wanted to be, I told her that I wanted to be the Doctor.

'Shouldn't you be wearing a lab coat and stethoscope like Paul?' She pointed to Paul Black, who was trying to strangle everyone with the stethoscope in question.

Before I could answer, a boy I didn't know from the other class spoke up.

'Paul's *a* doctor,' he explained, giving me a look of approval. 'He wants to be *the* Doctor.'

'Who?'

'Exactly,' we said at the same time, relieved that she understood.

She didn't. We were sent to the quiet table to reflect on why cheeking teachers was wrong.”
― Non Pratt, Trouble

“Can I offer you some tea while you ransack our place?' Lockwood asked politely.”
― Jonathan Stroud

“It was Andrew realized, not because of tension or nervousness, but purely because of the pulse of her heart, and suddenly he was gripped by possibility once again, that as long as there was that movement in someone, there was capacity to love and now his heart was beating faster and faster as if the power of the river were pushing blood through his veins, urging him to act. He felt Peggy stir, "So", she said, the faintest of tremors in her voice, "Quick question. With scones...do you go with jam or cream first?" Andrew considered the question. "I'm not sure it really matters..." He said. "Not in the grand scheme of things. " And then he leaned across, took Peggy's face in his hands, and kissed her.”
― Richard Roper, How Not to Die Alone

“In Britain, the biggest mistake you can make is judging the weather by looking at the sky out your window.
The unpredictable weather can switch from blue skies to a downpour in the blink of an eye, and all four seasons can occur in a single day.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?

Naturally, about a murder.”
― George Orwell, Decline of the English Murder

“One day, and it may be long off, but one day there will be bacon again. It might be mouse bacon, but that will do for me.”
― Frank Tayell, London

“Godfrey's wife Charmian sat with her eyes closed, attempting to put her thoughts into alphabetical order which Godfrey had told her was better than no order at all, since she now had grasp of neither logic nor chronology.”
― Muriel Spark, Memento Mori

“Emily's ginger brows were knit tight, the edges of each almost meeting over the bridge of her pert nose. "You know I will, you daft baggage. As if we have any other option.”
― Kady Cross, The Girl with the Windup Heart

“There were the years— years of childhood and innocence— when I had believed that carminative meant— well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life— a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Tea. Why are the Brits so obsessed with tea? Anything happens... "Put the kettle on." A death in the family. "Put the kettle on." Tornado. "Put the kettle on." Nuclear war. "Put the kettle on.”
― Andrea Portes, This Is Not a Ghost Story

“The German pilot had come up and was standing by smiling as Mr. Parker Pyne finished answering a long interrogation which he had not understood.
"What have I said?" he asked of the German
"That your father's Christian name is Tourist, that your profession is Charles, that the maiden name of your mother is Baghdad, and that you have come from Harriet.”
― Agath Christie

“To Miss Conway this was a challenge. Things which were somewhere had been stored by herself and could be located, but things which Alice had put in a safe place were often lost forever; the safeness of the place seemed to absolve her from the necessity of remembring where it was.”
― Elizabeth Fair, A Winter Away

“What good is it, being two stranded British fops in the heart of America, if we don't announce it on Halloween by wearing enormous fuzzy hats for the purpose of our humiliation?”
― Red Tash, This Brilliant Darkness

“Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship”
― Malcolm Bradbury, Cuts

“Stop fretting and eat your Madeira Cake..”
― Diane Samuels, Kindertransport: A Drama

“Bowen looked nervously about for peasants. It would be unendurable if they all turned out to be full of instinctive wisdom and natural good manners and unself-conscious grace and a deep, articulate understanding of death.”
― Kingsley Amis, I Like It Here

“He thought to himself now that if ever he went into the brewing business his posters would have written across the top "Bowen's Beer", and then underneath that in the middle a picture of Mrs. Knowles driniking a lot of it and falling about, and then across the bottom in bold or salient lettering the words "Makes You Drunk".”
― Kingsley Amis, I Like It Here

“Had he but known that before the day was over he would discover the hidden dimensions of the universe, Kit might have been better prepared. At least, he would have brought an umbrella.”
― Stephen R. Lawhead, The Skin Map

“Take it off at once. I'll lend you another. School ties are for schoolboys and schoolmasters. No grown man should be seen dead in a school tie. Same goes for regimental and club ties. Appalling bad taste."

William Boyd Armadillo”
― William Boyd

“But she’s experiencing as much rage as the platform on which her consciousness is being modeled, or simulated she thinks darkly, is allowing her to undergo. She’s sure she should be a lot angrier. … There is some unknowable number of her running on some substrate or another and the one that is most compliant will be chosen as the best her, to be carried forward to the next leg of this awful, brutal adventure, while the rest are snuffed out, overwritten, killed or at best archived. This should make her madder. It doesn’t. That fact that it doesn’t make her madder, also should make her madder. It doesn’t. And this should make her so bloody mad that she spontaneously combusts. It doesn’t.”
― Cory Doctorow, The Rapture of the Nerds

“Attlee is a modest man who has a great deal to be modest about.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Off the record, though, I think something is very, very rotten in the state of Denmark. Well, in the state of W.1.”
― Richard Easter, Don't You Want Me?

“Me? Sarcastic?" Alfred sniffed, the barest hint of a smile appearing on his lips. "It's as if you think I'm British.”
― Marie Lu, Batman: Nightwalker

“The Penultimate Hotel by Stewart Stafford

Enter sluggishly into the lobby,
A banquet is in progress in the restaurant,
They’re regurgitating reality from within,
And then eating their young.

An apocalyptic porter has radioactive cubes in the lift,
Housekeeping will have ten thousand years of light,
But the sheets in the rooms,
Will all turn to cream cheese.

The cooks in the kitchen are breaking bones and rules,
Creating a cake that stretches to infinity,
Babel babble with protesting eggs,
All baked in a hellfire oven.

The concierge gives out tips,
And tells guests they are awful and to leave,
While simultaneously tattooing diabolical potion recipes,
Inside a willing bellhop’s eyelids.

© 2021, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Buckingham palace is not a noble home, it's the national zoo of England, where they coddle massacre 'n stagnation, with no civil initiative for atonement.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations