E. V. Lucas

Edward Verrall Lucas, (11/12 June 1868 – 26 June 1938) was an English humorist, essayist, playwright, biographer, publisher, poet, novelist, short story writer and editor.

Quotes

  • This little book...is just a garland of good or enkindling poetry and prose fitted to urge folk into the open air...with perhaps a phrase or two for the feet to step to and the mind to brood on when the rest is over.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • One of the most serious thoughts that life provokes is the reflection that we can never tell, at the time, whether a word, a look, a touch, an occurrence of any kind, is trivial or important.
Every cat is really the most beautiful woman in the room.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The special quality of the act of finding something, with its consequent exhilaration, is half unexpectedness and half separateness. There being no warning, and the article coming to you by chance, no one is to be thanked, no one to be owed anything. In short, you have achieved the greatest human triumph — you have got something for nothing.
  • 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.
  • Americans are people who prefer the Continent to their own country, but refuse to learn its languages.
    • "The Continental Dictionary", in Punch, vol. 165 (12 December 1923), p. 568
    • Collected in Encounters and Diversions (1924), p. 109
  • The smell of autumnal woods, as well as of coffee roasting in the towns, is among the few things that the French arrange better than we.

Over Bemerton's (1908)

Over Bemerton's: An Easy-Going Chronicle (New York: Macmillan, 1908)
  • 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.
    • ch. 2, p. 12
  • To Naomi's serene, sane mind the world has to be accepted as it is, and therefore she is always the same. Not that she considers everything perfect, but she has an instinctive realisation of the inevitability of imperfection which keeps her contented — or at any rate prevents querulous discontent.
    • ch. 2, p. 13
  • 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.
    • ch. 2, p. 16
  • Not the least remarkable thing in this wonderful world in which we grope and have our being, is the amazing differences that can exist in the children of the same parents.
    • ch. 2, p. 18
  • The true Londoner cares no straw for sanitation. He thrives on ill conditions.
    • ch. 3, p. 22
  • It was Henri Taine, I think, who said that there was no volume he could not compress into a chapter, and no chapter that would not go into a sentence. Dr. Giles has carried out Taine's thrasonical brag. There is no Chinese lifetime, however crowded and illustrious, that he cannot pack into a paragraph or a page.
    • ch. 3, p. 25
  • 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.
    • ch. 3, p. 26
  • 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.
    • ch. 5, p. 41
  • 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.
    • ch. 5, p. 42
  • 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.
    • ch. 5, p. 46
  • So long as there are advertisements there cannot be absolutely free speech. It is not humanly possible.
    • ch. 5, p. 47
  • Virtue we still consider the best goal for others: but for ourselves, success. Success is the new god, and will be, I suppose, for some time yet, so zealously is the altar flame guarded.
    • ch. 5, p. 50
  • Libraries...he does not much esteem. People should own their books, he holds ; but that, of course, is a counsel of perfection, or would be were it not for the multitude of reprints that are now to be had at the price of a cigar.
    • ch. 6, p. 55
  • What can become of book-hunting...if everything is reprinted in uniform binding for a shilling or sixpence?
    • ch. 6, p. 55
  • 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.
    • ch. 6, p. 56
  • The time for second-hand book-shops...is after one's work, not during one's work.
    • ch. 6, p. 56
  • I see that the pigeon-holes of Fleet Street must be full of these anticipatory articles which only need occasional revision to date to be all ready when the scythe is finally sharpened. To meet an editor must be for a thoughtful celebrity as chilling as the spectacle of the mummy at the Egyptian banquet.
    • ch. 9, p. 86
  • 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.
    • ch. 10, p. 93
  • 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.
    • ch. 10, p. 93
  • 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.
    • ch. 10, p. 99
  • The art of life...is to be thought odd. Everything will then be permitted to you.
    • ch. 10, p. 99
  • It was a dull day for English readers (I think) when the description of the person was first considered unnecessary. We rarely get it now.
    • ch. 11, p. 104
  • "Well," I said, "I'm sorry if cheerfulness is so impracticable. It would be new, at any rate, and novelty is said to be a great thing."
    "Not in songs," replied Alf. "They don't want anything new in songs except the tune. They've all got to be about the same things for ever and ever.”
    • ch. 12, p. 118
  • 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.
    • ch. 13, p. 128
  • Apart from the necessity of replenishing his stock by attending sales and buying books; the wearing task of looking narrowly at larcenous fellow-creatures; the pangs that it must cost him to sell the books that he wants to keep; and the attacks made upon his tenderer feelings by unfortunate impoverished creatures with worthless books to sell; apart from these drawbacks, the life of a second-hand bookseller seems to me a happy one. I could myself lead it with considerable contentment.
    • ch. 13, p. 129
  • A second-hand bookseller, I found, may read much in his time, but he cannot read continuously.
    • ch. 13, p. 130
  • 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.
    • ch. 13, p. 133
  • Life is strangely suspicious and impatient of youth and candour and innocence and naïveté. Hardly does it perceive these exquisite qualities to exist than it rubs away their bloom with a rough finger. How often one longs for an arrested progress — for a little girl to go on being a little girl a little longer; for the perpetual kitten of our dreams! But no; the Creator is not that kind of artist.
    • ch. 14, p. 142
  • I asked him how he kept his temper when customers were unreasonable.
    "Oh, that's all in the day's work," he said. "I know they don't mean it. It's not the gentlemen who are snappish, it's their empty stomachs...."
    "It is not the gentlemen," he went on, "that break a waiter's heart; it's the kitchen. That's where our trouble is. It's cooks that ruin eating-houses. A cook who has a grudge against a head-waiter can cost his governor pounds and pounds a day. It's all in his hands; he can spoil things, or he can keep them back till the customers bang out in a fury.... Gentlemen who blame waiters for being slow don't remember that the food has got to be cooked and served up, and that the waiter doesn't do either.
    "But there;" Mr. Duckie said, "an empty stomach can't remember everything. I often think this would be a better-tempered and happier world if we ate a little all the time instead of saving up our appetites for real meals. But speaking as a waiter, I can see it's best as it is."
    • ch. 15, p. 150
  • "What was that?" said Grandmamma, who is not really deaf, but when in a tight place likes to gain time by this harmless imposition.
    • ch. 16, p. 159
  • "What I always wonder about Dickens," he said, "is how on earth did the man correct his proofs?" Because, as he went on to point out, between the time of writing and the time of correcting he must have thought of so many new descriptive touches, so many new creatures to add, so many new and adorable fantastic comments on life. How could he deny himself the joy of putting these in? — for there can be no pleasure like that of creation.”
    • ch. 16, p. 162
  • As a child I had no doubts; but now? Take, for instance, telling the truth. I was brought up to believe that one should do that, and I knew a lie a mile off. But now I see that mendacity, or at any rate the suppression of one's real feelings and opinions, is the cement that binds society together.
    • ch. 17, p. 173
  • "Do you think women ought to have the vote?" I asked him.
    "My mother says," he replied, "that all the clever women have it already."
    "Has she got it?" I asked.
    He grinned. "I should rather say she had," he answered.
    • ch. 18, p. 175
  • 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.
    • ch. 19, p. 192
  • We have to remember that children, as creatures of delight, are of comparatively recent discovery....A few poets had praised the young very gaily — Prior and Ambrose Phillips, for example — but rather as courtiers than human beings: it was left for Blake first to see that the child was not merely the young of man but a separate creature, filled with fugitive and exquisite charm.
    • ch. 19, p. 192
  • It came to me this morning all unexpectedly, being the payment of a debt which I had long since given up hope of ever receiving. In other words, it is sheer profit, like all repaid loans.
    • ch. 20, p. 199
  • Venice indeed imposes laziness. Even Americans doing Europe approach restfulness there. There is no hurrying a gondolier.
    • ch. 21, p. 210
  • In France he would have been, I think, a sad bore, for there he would have discovered so many points of superiority to the English: but not even so keen a censor of his own country and countrymen as Mr. Dabney could find aught in Venice, except such forgivable and inimitable advantages as crumbling and picturesque architecture and clear skies, to hold up as a model for home adoption.
    • ch. 21, p. 214
  • 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.
    • ch. 23, p. 234
  • Have misfortune and disease and frustration and insecurity been necessary to man's ingenuity and industry? Without sorrow should we have had no telegraph? without tears, no camera? Have all the benefits of civilisation been wrung from us in some effort to escape from the blows of fate? And even if so, might not happiness, without the advantages of progress, have still been better?
    • ch. 23, p. 237
  • He was born in 1770, in what he thought the best of all lands— Ireland; and he came home from the sea in 1802, but he did not take his pen in hand until 1836, during which time his memory had purged itself of inessentials. He wrote them not for the cold eye of a publisher's reader but (like a gentleman) for his own family's entertainment.
    • ch. 24, p. 239
  • I know nothing of grammar;
    At school they never could hammer
       Or beat it into my head.
    The bare word made me stammer,
       And turn pale as if I were dead.
    But here I may as well be telling,
    I'm often damned out in my spelling.
    • ch. 24, p. 240
  • I could go on indefinitely thus, calling forth from their graves these hard-bitten sea dogs; but that is enough. It is literature in its way, is it not?
    Are there the same or kindred characters in the Navy to-day, one wonders. Let us hope so.
    • ch. 24, p. 242
  • I wonder that affectionate parents can ever give their consent to their children's marriage at all. I can understand a father having no particular objection to his son's wife, and a mother to her daughter's husband; but how a father can ever even tolerate his daughter's husband or a mother the wife of her son, that is beyond my imagination.
    • ch. 25, p. 261
  • 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.
    • ch. 27, p. 276
  • She doesn't love you because of anything — she loves. She doesn't care whether you are handsome or ugly, or old or young, or cruel or kind, or strong or weak, or conceited Or humble, whether you drop your h's, or have nothing in the bank — those things are beside the mark, because she loves.
    • ch. 27, p. 279

Old Lamps for New (1911)

Old Lamps for New (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1911)
  • When it comes to analysing the pleasures of life, the privilege of approving and disapproving in conversation must be ranked very high, and reading aloud makes it so very harmless an amusement, since no talebearing is involved.
    • "A Friend of the Town", p. 118
  • 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.
    • "A Glimpse of Civilization", p. 183

London Lavender (1912)

London Lavender: An Entertainment (New York: Macmillan, 1912)
  • To-day — well, my Utopia, if ever I framed one, would be a land where the laws demanded that people should be vicious. Then one would be able to count at any rate on a little virtue. If no man might live with a woman in any but an irregular union, there would be at once quite a run on honest matrimony and the Law Courts would be full of desperately wicked monogamists; while if every one was expected to steal and swindle, there would soon be an extensive criminal class who respected property.
    • ch. 6
  • I walked back by way of the sea-lions' enclosure to refresh my eyes with the King Penguin's perfect ecclesiastical tailoring. He was pacing moodily about as usual, in what one felt to be the interval between a marriage ceremony and a funeral service. Much better, I thought, to have left the £2000 a year to him. No harm would then be done, and what perfect episcopal garden-parties he could give with it!
    • ch. 8
  • "What is it like in the air?" I once asked him.
    "Ripping," he said.
    "But the sensations?” I continued. “How do you feel?"
    "Ripping," he said.
    "And what does the world look like down below as you rush along?"
    "Ripping," he said.
    • ch. 14
  • How can Nancy know her own mind when she has not got one? She is a dear, sweet girl, and I was devoted to her—am devoted to her—but she has no mind. It was I who was to give her that.
    • ch. 26
  • "Lotus-eating would give you a terrible stomachache," I said, "wouldn't it?"
    And the plucky little creature had the hardihood to reply, "I hope so."
    What can you do with people like this? and England is full of them. Suspicion of happiness is in our blood.
    • ch. 31

Loiterer's Harvest (1913)

Loiterer's Harvest (New York: Macmillan, 1913)
  • It is all to the good that insignificant-looking persons should do great things, but human nature will ever resent it. We are such determined idealists, we have such a passion for symmetry, that our first wish will always be that handsome does and handsome is shall be one.
    • "Surprises", p. 17
  • 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.
    • "Wayside Notes", p. 188
  • The books that one reads in the impressionable years, and therefore absorbs and remembers, are always so much better and more exciting than life.
    • "The Worst Prelude to Adventure", p. 252
  • 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.
    • "The Worst Prelude to Adventure", p. 254

The Phantom Journal (1919)

The Phantom Journal, &c. (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1919)
Adventures and Enthusiasms (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1920)
  • 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 Perfect Guest", p. 17
  • I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.
    • "Punctuality", p. 32

Rose and Rose (1921)

Rose and Rose: A Story (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1921)
  • 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.
    • p. 30
  • The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do.
    • p. 116
  • The trouble is that really wanting things is so rare. It's a lukewarm world!
    • p. 178

Encounters and Diversions (1924)

Encounters and Diversions (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1924)
  • Human nature is rarely so amusing as when trying to get a house off its hands. Women at this task can be untruthful enough, but their untruth lacks the infusion of candour which a skilful male liar can introduce.
    • "To be Let or Sold", p. 49
  • People in hotels strike no roots. The French phrase for chronic hotel guests even says so: they are called dwellers sur la branche.
    • "To be Let or Sold", p. 52
  • 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.
    • "Unbirthday and Other Presents", p. 89

Zigzags in France (1925)

Zigzags in France and Various Essays (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1925)
Wanderings and Diversions (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1926)
  • I should have remembered that black is the colour of France. Amusing that the typical figure of that country in so many people's imagination is a saucy girl with little or nothing on, whereas in reality it is an old woman in mourning.
    • "Zigzags in France", p. 39
  • The French never allow a distinguished son of France to lack a statue.
    • "Zigzags in France", p. 66
  • The man who is so painstakingly cautious about doing his own body no harm seldom does anything for anyone else.
    • "The Patients' Dilemma", p. 204
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