Butler English Quotes

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American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
W. Somerset Maugham (The Razor’s Edge)
It is sometimes said that butlers only truly exist in England. Other countries, whatever title is actually used, have only manservants. I tend to believe this is true. Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race are capable of. Continentals - and by and large the Celts, as you will no doubt agree - are as a rule unable to control themselves in moments of a strong emotion, and are thus unable to maintain a professional demeanour other than in the least challenging of situations. If I may return to my earlier metaphor - you will excuse my putting it so coarsely - they are like a man who will, at the slightest provocation, tear off his suit and his shirt and run about screaming. In a word, "dignity" is beyond such persons. We English have an important advantage over foreigners in this respect and it is for this reason that when you think of a great butler, he is bound, almost by definition, to be an Englishman.
Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)
He was a true English butler, just like his father before him, and his grandfather before that. Three generations; bred and butlered.
Ken Magee (The Black Conspiracy (Ancient magic meets the Internet #2))
As far as I’m concerned, whom is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.’ CALVIN TRILLIN
Caroline Taggart (My Grammar and I (Or Should That Be 'Me'?): Old-School Ways to Sharpen Your English)
Samuel Butler suggests that machines will be the real rulers in the coming ages, that man will be preserved only to feed and care for the machines
Dorothy Scarborough (The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction)
That would be me,” I said. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. Is this a joke?” “I beg your pardon?” the older fellow inquired politely, a faint smile on his narrow face. He sounded like an English butler. “You know, a tall priest and a short rabbi walk into a pagan bookstore …” “What?” He looked down at his companion, seeming to realize for the first time that he was quite a bit shorter and in fact of a different religious order than he. “Oh, gracious, I suppose it must seem amusing at that.” He didn’t seem amused, though.
Kevin Hearne (Hexed (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #2))
Nigel was smiling, the bloody sod. He was loving playing the formal English butler, watching Nicholas turn red and tongue-tied. He saw Mike was grinning, quite enjoying herself. “Oh, bugger off, both of you.” He stomped up the stairs, the sound of Mike’s and Nigel’s laughter following him.
Catherine Coulter (The Lost Key (A Brit in the FBI #2))
Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race is capable of. Continentals
Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)
They talk as an English butler might after several years in a Chicago grand-opera company.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (F. Scott Fitzgerald Premium 9 Book Collection)
They talk as an English butler might after several years in a Chicago grand-opera company.
Francis Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)
Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race are capable of. Continentals
Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)
Ones u lern how to speake English money come to much around then like jus alot of it
W.B. Yeats (Plays of Changing Ireland)
49 Wilhelm Wundt Principles of Physiological Psychology (1873–74) The book that made Wundt the dominant figure in the new science of psychology. Translated into English by Edward Titchener in 1904.
Tom Butler-Bowdon (50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books (50 Classics))
I suppose I could have been nicer when I was at Columbia. I could have been polite, respectful, turned in my papers on time. Funny thing is, I knew a guy like that. English major. Loved to read. Never got in any trouble, just hung out in Butler Library reading poetry and English history. Ran into him the other day. Guy has three master's degrees, taught high school, even did a few years in the Marines. Know what he does today? He makes $9.75 an hour as a librarian. I was a jerk when I went to Columbia. But I was never a sucker.
Ted Rall (The Year of Loving Dangerously)
Is that all?” asked the butler. His slightly melodic accent was nearly impossible to place. It could have been British, but it wasn’t any British accent I had ever heard. The words Old English came to mind, too. As in old, old English. This, I’m certain, was a psychic hit, but I could have been wrong. Just how old Franklin was remained to be seen. “Thank you, Franklin. That will be all,” said Kingsley, waving him off. The butler nodded. “If you and the lady need anything else, please do not hesitate to rouse me from a deep and satisfying sleep.” “We won’t, Franklin. Now, off you go!
J.R. Rain (American Vampire (Vampire for Hire #3))
The nineteenth-century clergyman William Barnes preferred wheelsaddle to bicycle and folkwain to omnibus. By the same token forceps would be nipperlings, and pathology would be painlore. Some of his new words recalled the language of Old English poetry: he proposed glee-mote in place of concert, and the wonderful cellar-thane instead of butler.
Henry Hitchings (The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English)
With the introduction of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, Miss Mitchell managed to create the two most famous lovers in the English-speaking world since Romeo and Juliet. Scarlett springs alive in the first sentence of the book and holds the narrative center for over a thousand pages. She is a fabulous, pixilated, one-of-a-kind creation, and she does not utter a dull line in the entire book.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
MAURY: What is a gentleman, anyway? ANTHONY: A man who never has pins under his coat lapel. MAURY: Nonsense! A man's social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich. DICK: He's a man who prefers the first edition of a book to the last edition of a newspaper. RACHAEL: A man who never gives an impersonation of a dope-fiend. MAURY: An American who can fool an English butler into thinking he's one. MURIEL: A man who comes from a good family and went to Yale or Harvard or Princeton, and has money and dances well, and all that. MAURY: At last—the perfect definition! Cardinal Newman's is now a back number.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (F. Scott Fitzgerald Premium 9 Book Collection)
They won’t do it, Ian,” Jordan Townsende said the night after Ian was released on his own recognizance. Pacing back and forth across Ian’s drawing room, he said again, “They will not do it.” “They’ll do it,” Ian said dispassionately. The words were devoid of concern; not even his eyes showed interest. Days ago Ian had passed the point of caring about the investigation. Elizabeth was gone; there had been no ransom note, nothing whatever-no reason in the world to continue believing that she’d been taken against her will. Since Ian knew damned well he hadn’t killed her or had her abducted, the only remaining conclusion was that Elizabeth had left him for someone else. The authorities were still vacillating about the other man she’d allegedly met in the arbor because the gardener’s eyesight had been proven to be extremely poor, and even he admitted that it “might have been tree limbs moving around her in the dim light, instead of a man’s arms.” Ian, however, did not doubt it. The existence of a lover was the only thing that made sense; he had even suspected it the night before she disappeared. She hadn’t wanted him in her bed; if anything but a lover had been worrying her that night, she’d have sought the protection of his arms, even if she didn’t confide in him. But he had been the last thing she’d wanted. No, he hadn’t actually suspected it-that would have been more pain than he could have endured then. Now, however, he not only suspected it, he knew it, and the pain was beyond anything he’d ever imagined existed. “I tell you they won’t bring you to trial,” Jordan repeated. “Do you honestly think they will?” he demanded, looking first to Duncan and then to the Duke of Stanhope, who were seated in the drawing room. In answer, both men raised dazed, pain-filled eyes to Jordan’s, shook their heads in an effort to seem decisive, then looked back down at their hands. Under English law Ian was entitled to a trial before his peers; since he was a British lord, that meant he could only be tried in the House of Lords, and Jordan was clinging to that as if it were Ian’s lifeline. “You aren’t the first man among us to have a spoiled wife turn missish on him and vanish for a while in hopes of bringing him to heel,” Jordan continued, desperately trying to make it seem as if Elizabeth were merely sulking somewhere-no doubt unaware that her husband’s reputation had been demolished and that his very life was going to be in jeopardy. “They aren’t going to convene the whole damn House of Lords just to try a beleaguered husband whose wife has taken a start,” he continued fiercely. “Hell, half the lords in the House can’t control their wives. Why should you be any different?” Alexandra looked up at him, her eyes filled with misery and disbelief. Like Ian, she knew Elizabeth wasn’t indulging in a fit of the sullens. Unlike Ian, however, she could not and would not believe her friend had taken a lover and run away. Ian’s butler appeared in the doorway, a sealed message in his hand, which he handed to Jordan. “Who knows?” Jordan tried to joke as he opened it. “Maybe this is from Elizabeth-a note asking me to intercede with you before she dares present herself to you.” His smile faded abruptly. “What is it?” Alex cried, seeing his haggard expression. Jordan crumpled the summons in his hand and turned to Ian with angry regret. “They’re convening the House of Lords.” “It’s good to know,” Ian said with cold indifference as he pushed out of his chair and started for his study, “that I’ll have one friend and one relative there.
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
He stared at it in utter disbelief while his secretary, Peters, who’d only been with him for a fortnight, muttered a silent prayer of gratitude for the break and continued scribbling as fast as he could, trying futilely to catch up with his employer’s dictation. “This,” said Ian curtly, “was sent to me either by mistake or as a joke. In either case, it’s in excruciatingly bad taste.” A memory of Elizabeth Cameron flickered across Ian’s mind-a mercenary, shallow litter flirt with a face and body that had drugged his mind. She’d been betrothed to a viscount when he’d met her. Obviously she hadn’t married her viscount-no doubt she’d jilted him in favor of someone with even better prospects. The English nobility, as he well knew, married only for prestige and money, then looked elsewhere for sexual fulfillment. Evidently Elizabeth Cameron’s relatives were putting her back on the marriage block. If so, they must be damned eager to unload her if they were willing to forsake a title for Ian’s money…That line of conjecture seemed so unlikely that Ian dismissed it. This note was obviously a stupid prank, perpetrated, no doubt, by someone who remembered the gossip that had exploded over that weekend house party-someone who thought he’d find the note amusing. Completely dismissing the prankster and Elizabeth Cameron from his mind, Ian glanced at his harassed secretary who was frantically scribbling away. “No reply is necessary,” he said. As he spoke he flipped the message across his desk toward his secretary, but the white parchment slid across the polished oak and floated to the floor. Peters made an awkward dive to catch it, but as he lurched sideways all the other correspondence that went with his dictation slid off his lap onto the floor. “I-I’m sorry, sir,” he stammered, leaping up and trying to collect the dozens of pieces of paper he’d scattered on the carpet. “Extremely sorry, Mr. Thornton,” he added, frantically snatching up contracts, invitations and letters and shoving them into a disorderly pile. His employer appeared not to hear him. He was already rapping out more instructions and passing the corresponding invitations and letters across the desk. “Decline the first three, accept the fourth, decline the fifth. Send my condolences on this one. On this one, explain that I’m going to be in Scotland, and send an invitation to join me there, along with directions to the cottage.” Clutching the papers to his chest, Peters poked his face up on the opposite side of the desk. “Yes, Mr. Thornton!” he said, trying to sound confident. But it was hard to be confident when one was on one’s knees. Harder still when one wasn’t entirely certain which instructions of the morning went with which invitation or piece of correspondence. Ian Thornton spent the rest of the afternoon closeted with Peters, heaping more dictation on the inundated clerk. He spent the evening with the Earl of Melbourne, his future father-in-law, discussing the earl’s daughter and himself. Peters spent part of his evening trying to learn from the butler which invitations his employer was likely to accept or reject.
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
I love you just as much as an English butler,
Nancy Ann Healy (Intersection (Alex and Cassidy Book 1))
The word “ooloi” could not be translated directly into English because its meaning was as complex as Nikanj’s scent. “Treasured stranger.” “Bridge.” “Life trader.” “Weaver.” “Magnet.” Magnet, my birth mother says. People are drawn to ooloi and can’t escape. She couldn’t, certainly. But then, neither could Nikanj escape her or any of its mates. The Oankali said the chemical bonds of mating were as difficult to break as the habit of breathing. Scents
Octavia E. Butler (Imago (Xenogenesis, #3))
The proponents of Harlem jive talk ... do not hope that courses in the lingo will ever be offered at Harvard or Columbia. Neither do they expect to learn that Mrs. Faunteen-Chauncey of the Mayfair Set addresses her English butler as 'stud hoss', and was called in reply, 'a sturdy old hen.' -- Original Handbook of Harlem Jive, 1944.
Dan Burley (Dan Burley's Jive)
It is even open to question whether this reference was due to Butler’s having read the book. The passage referred to is in the second part of Hudibras, which was not published until 1664, twenty-seven years after the publication of the New Canaan. It is perfectly possible that Butler may have known Morton; for in 1637 the future author of Hudibras was already twenty-five years old, and Morton lingered about London for six or seven years after that. There are indications that he knew Ben Jonson;[185] and, indeed, it is scarcely possible that with his sense of humor and convivial tastes Morton should not often have met the poets and playwrights of the day at the Mermaid.
Thomas Morton (The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton with Introductory Matter and Notes: A Bold Exploration of Colonial Encounters and Cultural Differences)
General Butler was invoking Blacks’ natural proclivity for violence and criminality to avoid punishment for the massacre he had carried out. But hardly any congressional investigators questioned his motive for expressing these racist ideas, which at the time were being codified by a prison doctor in Italy. Cesare Lombroso “proved” in 1876 that non-White men loved to kill, “mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.” His Criminal Man gave birth to the discipline of criminology in 1876. Criminals were born, not bred, Lombroso said. He believed that born criminals emitted physical signs that could be studied, measured, and quantified, and that the “inability to blush”—and therefore, dark skin—had “always been considered the accompaniment of crime.” Black women, in their close “degree of differentiation from the male,” he claimed in The Female Offender in 1895, were the prototypical female criminals. As White terrorists brutalized, raped, and killed people in communities around the Black world, the first crop of Western criminologists were intent on giving criminals a Black face and the well-behaved citizen a White face. Lombroso’s student, Italian law professor Raffaele Garofalo, invented the term “criminology” (criminologia) in 1885. British physician Havelock Ellis popularized Lombroso in the English-speaking world, publishing a compendium of his writings in 1890.20
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
What is an operating system, really? What did Cutler’s team wish to create? Picture a wealthy English household in the early 1900s. Think of a computer—the hardware—as a big house, the family’s residence. The house consists of plumbing and lighting, bricks and mortar, windows and doors—all manner of physical things and processes. Next, imagine computer software as the people in the house. The household staff, living downstairs, provide a whole range of services at once. The butler stands by the door, the driver washes the car, the housekeeper presses the linen, the cook provides meals and bakes cakes, the gardener rakes the leaves from the lawn. And this activity, which seemingly happens of its own accord, is coordinated by the head of the household staff. Such is the life of the downstairs dwellers, who in a certain sense exist in the background. Then consider the people upstairs. They are the whole reason for the toil of the people downstairs. The husband desires a driver not simply for peace of mind but because he wishes to travel. The wife employs a cook, so her family can eat well. The children benefit from the work of the gardener, who clears the yard of debris, enabling them to play outdoors safely. The picture of the family upstairs and their faithful downstairs servants neatly illustrates the great divide in the world of software. The people upstairs are the applications: the word-processing, electronic ledger, database, publishing and numerous other programs that satisfy human needs and wants. The people downstairs collectively perform the functions of an operating system. Theirs is a realm of services, some automatic, some requiring a special request. These services lay the basis for the good stuff of life. Cutler
G. Pascal Zachary (Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft)
To GIP  (GIP)   v.a. To take out the guts of herrings.Bailey.   GIPSY  (GI'PSY)   n.s.[Corrupted from Egyptian; for when they first appeared in Europe they declared, and perhaps truly, that they were driven from Egypt by the Turks. They are now mingled with all nations.]1. A vagabond who pretends to foretell futurity, commonly by palmestry or physiognomy. The butler, though he is sure to lose a knife, a fork, or a spoon every time his fortune is told him, shuts himself up in  the pantry with an old gipsy for above half an hour.Addison.
Samuel Johnson (A Dictionary of the English Language (Complete and Unabridged in Two Volumes), Volume One)
She was convinced that all butlers were born a certain age at which they stayed until they disappeared in a puff of discreet smoke. For a good servant would never die on his employer, that would be just too inconvenient.
Verity Bright (A Very English Murder (A Lady Eleanor Swift Mystery, #1))
She raised her hand. ‘No, Clifford, you may not ask permission. It’s my turn to ask for permission… permission to hug the life out of you.’ For the first time since arriving at the Hall, his stiff butler’s demeanour slipped. ‘Permission… granted, my lady.
Verity Bright (A Very English Murder (A Lady Eleanor Swift Mystery, #1))
Quiet as it's kept, there is a certain type of "upper class" white folks who don't use "colored help" at all. In fact, household labor is a segregated occupation. A Lancashire-born (English) butler, asked if he had encountered many black men and women in his 20 years of service, said reflectively, "I can't think of one I worked with. On one job we had Italian cook, an Irish kitchen man, a French lady's maid, an English butler, and an English parlormaid." The upper echelon's household staff is 99-99/100% white.
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor (Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap by Verta Mae)
Why should I write to the newspapers instead of to the machines themselves, why not summon a monster meeting of machines, place the steam engine in the chair, and hold a council of war?” asked the anonymous “mad correspondent.” “I answer, the time is not yet ripe for this. . . . Our plan is to turn man’s besotted enthusiasm to our own advantage, to make him develop us to the utmost, and find himself enslaved unawares. “My object is to do my humble share towards pointing out what is the ultimatum, the ne plus ultra of perfection in mechanized development,” the writer continued, “even though that end be so far off that only a Darwinian posterity can arrive at it. I therefore venture to suggest that we declare machinery and the general development of the human race to be well and effectually completed when—when—when—Like the woman in white, I had almost committed myself of my secret. Nay, this is telling too much. I must content myself with disclosing something less than the whole. I will give a great step, but not the last. We will say then that a considerable advance has been made in mechanical development, when all men, in all places, without any loss of time, are cognizant through their senses, of all that they desire to be cognizant of in all other places, at a low rate of charge, so that the back country squatter may hear his wool sold in London and deal with the buyer himself—may sit in his own chair in a back country hut and hear the performance of Israel in Ægypt at Exeter Hall—may taste an ice on the Rakaia, which he is paying for and receiving in the Italian opera house Covent garden. Multiply instance ad libitum—this is the grand annihilation of time and place which we are all striving for, and which in one small part we have been permitted to see actually realised.”67 This letter, bearing the stamp of Samuel Butler in style if not in name, was signed “Lunaticus.” One hundred years after Erasmus Darwin gathered his circle of Lunaticks in the English Midlands, a strand of telegraph wire was uncoiled at the antipodes of the earth. Sparked by the transit of a few pulses of electromagnetic code over this embryonic fragment of a net, Samuel Butler foresaw the evolution, perhaps not so far off as he imagined, of that phenomenon, somewhere between mechanism and organism, now manifested as the World Wide Web.
George Dyson (Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence (Helix Books))
Every member of Earthseed learned to read and to write, and most knew at least two languages—usually Spanish and English, since those were the two most useful. Anyone who joined the group, child or adult, had to begin at once to learn these basics and to acquire a trade. Anyone who had a trade was always in the process of teaching it to someone else. My mother insisted on this, and it does seem sensible
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1))
The day itself, June 6, 1944, has come to be commemorated as “D-Day.” An immense invasion fleet—6,939 ships in all: 1,213 warships, including six battleships, 23 cruisers and 104 destroyers, 4,126 landing craft of various types, 736 support vessels, and 864 merchantmen—departed ports all along the southern coast of England on June 5, bound for an assembly point in the middle of the English Channel, from whence they sailed south, for France.
Daniel Allen Butler (Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel)
There was an English major. He wanted to be a writer and tell our story from the inside—which had only been done thirty or forty times before.
Octavia E. Butler (Bloodchild and Other Stories)
Salisbury
Fergus Butler-Gallie (A Field Guide to the English Clergy: A Compendium of Diverse Eccentrics, Pirates, Prelates and Adventurers; All Anglican, Some Even Practising)
Did they like being maids & butlers? Before you answer this consider everything you've ever read about English history after Robin Hood and before he Who. Your choices were: serving, being served, being killed by Jack the Ripper. So, the employee class made the best of it and got with the program. It was indoor work, after all. And as a wise man once observed, "You're gonna hafta serve somebody." (Bob Dylan, C. 1497-1580). And it beat mining.
Chris Kelly
William Butler Yeats is considered one of the most seminal English language poets of the 20th Century. Perhaps his most famous poem, The Second Coming, he penned in 1921. The themes he touches on
Thomas Horn (Pandemonium's Engine: How the End of the Church Age, the Rise of Transhumanism, and the Coming of the bermensch (Overman) Herald Satans Imminent and Final Assault on the Creation of God)