If there is one quote on this Earth that I constantly think of (and all too rarely say out loud) it is this one, from the inimitable Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE:

“You always were a fatheaded worm without any soul, weren’t you?”

It’s so universally applicable, you see. Whenever anyone disagrees with me on any really pressing matter of taste, it is likely to float through my brain. However, I do realize it might not go over well, so tact refrains. In context, you may see why the quote’s charms are so multifaceted:

“I say, Bertie,” he said, after a pause of about an hour and a quarter.

“Hallo!”

“Do you like the name Mabel?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“You don’t think there’s a kind of music in the word, like the wind rustling gently through the tree-tops?”

“No.”

He seemed disappointed for a moment; then cheered up.

“Of course, you wouldn’t. You always were a fatheaded worm without any soul, weren’t you?”

Somehow, it both admonishes me in a comforting and amusing manner that my opinion is daft, subjective and irrelevant, (much like the speaker, Bingo Little) but allows me at the same time to dispense with the daft, subjective and irrelevant opinions of others quite breezily. In addition, it summons some of the world’s most pleasant literary companions to mind, which can’t fail to buck one up when one has been told that Mozart was a hack or sci-fi can’t be literature.

Quotes from “Jeeves in the Springtime”.