E. V. Lucas Quotes

Bachelors have many advantages, but they are all minor. Perhaps the greatest advantage they enjoy is that of still being able to follow an impulse; but even this rarely seems to give them all the pleasure that it would give many a man who has tasted restriction. Feeding on impulses can become as distasteful as feeding on jam roll.

I had thought of a second-hand bookshop as being off the main stream of human frailty and temptation; and behold it was the resort of the most abandoned! Is there no natural honesty? I wished that Mr. Bemerton would return and liberate me to walk upstairs out of life again and get on with my make-believe.

Fixed customs must be surrendered, lateness must become punctuality, cigarette ends must not burn the mantelpiece, one misses one's own China tea. The bathroom is too far and other people use it. There is no hook for the strop. In short, to be a really good guest and at ease under alien roofs it is necessary, I suspect, to have no home ties of one's own ; certainly to have no very tyrannical habits.

It was almost impossible for a book to carry no association for that swooping, pouncing brain. He either knew it, or knew of it, or had always wanted to know it.

"What is it like in the air?" I once asked him. </br> "Ripping," he said. </br> "But the sensations?” I continued. “How do you feel?" </br> "Ripping," he said. </br> "And what does the world look like down below as you rush along?" </br> "Ripping," he said.

"Lotus-eating would give you a terrible stomachache," I said, "wouldn't it?" </br> And the plucky little creature had the hardihood to reply, "I hope so." </br> What can you do with people like this? and England is full of them. Suspicion of happiness is in our blood.

I have come to the conclusion that the golfing temperament is essentially aristocratic— a feudal inheritance — the property exclusively of those who can see nothing absurd or even degrading in the spectacle of powerful frivolous men being followed by boys of burden.

Suzanne could not read a word, but the last atom of flavour was conserved in every dish that she sent to table; and what is literature compared with cooking? One is shadow and the other is substance.

Cynicism and self-esteem run through everything. Christian of course we never were, and never shall be, not even in adversity; but we are no longer in the least afraid of God.

Unhappily in England just now,...the type of journalist who seems to have most readers is permitted to be the least sagacious and the least independent.

I never need to see any one twice to know them. My first impressions are always right. Sometimes I go back on my first impressions, but it is always a mistake to do so.

I hate to be reminded of the passage of time, and in a garden of flowers one can never escape from it. It is one of the charms of a garden of grass and evergreens, that there for a while one is allowed to hug the illusion that time tarries.

The crying need for the moment in this country, as in America, is a gospel of poverty to cope with the gospel of riches that is vitiating society.

I know nothing of grammar; </br> At school they never could hammer </br> Or beat it into my head. </br> The bare word made me stammer, </br> And turn pale as if I were dead. </br> But here I may as well be telling, </br> I'm often damned out in my spelling.

I bade farewell to the May stars, and did one of the most adventurous things left to us — I went to bed. For no one can lay a hand on our dreams. All the authors of the world cannot spoil those.