Love Quote by Hector Hugh Munro

Munro, better known as Saki, delivers this like a toast that doubles as a knife. On the surface its just gourmand snobbery: oysters, asparagus, good wines, the holy trinity of cultivated appetite. The real payload is the reversal that follows. He pretends to entertain the moral defense of the ascetic (surely the joyless man has a soul), then punctures it by implying he may not even have a functioning body. Its a classic Saki move: elevate a social prejudice into metaphysics, then laugh as it collapses.

The intent is less about food than about the Victorian-Edwardian obsession with respectability and self-denial. In that world, pleasure often needed alibis; Saki strips away the pretense and frames refusal as pathology. The phrase "instinct for being unhappy" is doing heavy work. It recasts misery not as tragic circumstance but as cultivated talent, a practiced reflex. That is cynical, but also psychologically sharp: some people do treat deprivation as proof of virtue, and then wonder why life feels like an unpaid internship.

Subtextually, the quote defends a certain kind of elite hedonism: taste as a moral argument. Yet its not merely class performance. It mocks the puritanical impulse that equates enjoyment with shallowness. Saki is saying that the anti-pleasure pose is its own vanity, and a tedious one. In his fiction, characters weaponize manners and menu choices to expose hypocrisies; here, the menu becomes a quick test for whether someone is equipped to live rather than merely behave.