E. V. Lucas Quotes

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.

After my experiences I know that it is not the disposal of books that presents the greatest difficulty to a bookseller, but the acquisition of them.

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.

What does matter is that in a French inn you may be as witty as you can, as intelligent as you can, but some one there will be more intelligent, more witty.

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.

The time for second-hand book-shops...is after one's work, not during one's work.

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.

I don't want to give it to you, so please take it quickly and hide it, or I shall ask for it back. It is a very sordid feeling, I admit; but if you also had the collector's temperament you would know that to give away anything is nearly an impossibility, and to give away anything without regretting it is quite an impossibility.

It is when one reads counsels of something more than perfection — counsels of pedantic priggishness, shall we say — to natural, healthy children, that one realises how necessary compromise is to daily life and how far removed perfection is from the natural human being.

His mind...with all its vigour and acumen, though naturally inclined to justice and courage, is about as capable of impartiality as a prize-fighter is capable of metaphysics.

It is possible to give wedding presents, birthday presents, and Christmas presents without any thought or affection at all: they can be ordered by post card; but the unbirthday present demands the nicest care. It is therefore the best of all, and it is the only kind to which the golden rule of present-giving imperatively applies — the golden rule which insists that you must never give to another anything that you would not rather keep for ourself, nothing that does not cost you a pang to part from.

This is it: "There are two words for everything." Surely that is wisdom! The whole theory of party politics is in it, for one thing; and indeed all argument.

"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.

A second-hand bookseller, I found, may read much in his time, but he cannot read continuously.

The initial difficulty...having been slowly overcome...all went very smoothly, and the family quickly dropped company manners and showed me what it really was. Not that the difference was very marked, but a difference of course there always is — company manners being for the most part a kind of sandpaper that removes the asperities (and occasionally the attractions) of personality.