E. V. Lucas Quotes

The world is a great leveller, and every year brings with it certain modifying influences. I like a man to be his age. Twenty-one is not an age I am very partial to: it is omniscient and exorbitant and cruel; but I like a youth of twenty-one none the less. Forty makes better company: when a man knows how little he knows, and how little life holds for him, and is yet unsubdued.

The art of life...is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candour. You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do. Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception.

I will admit to feeling exceedingly proud when any cat has singled me out for notice; for, of course, every cat is really the most beautiful woman in the room. That is part of their deadly fascination.

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.

The mere fact of never having a holiday is not in itself distressing. Holidays often are overrated disturbances of routine, costly and uncomfortable, and they usually need another holiday to correct their ravages.

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.

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.

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.

It is all as it should be if they were really friends once, for friends, in fact, belong to periods rather than to all time, although sentiment would have it otherwise. One is always changing a little, although of radical change there is almost none, and new friends are found in tune with each stage.

One must expect inconsistency. Every moment conditions are different, and therefore we are; every moment we are older, and there is less of life to live, and the thought can lead to odd impulses.

There are moments when one is more ashamed of what is called culture than any one can ever be of ignorance.

So long as there are advertisements there cannot be absolutely free speech. It is not humanly possible.

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.

"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.

The books that one reads in the impressionable years, and therefore absorbs and remembers, are always so much better and more exciting than life.