E. V. Lucas

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 …

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.

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, …

Venice indeed imposes laziness. Even Americans doing Europe approach restfulness there. There is no hurrying a gondolier.

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.

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 …

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 …

"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.

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 …

"What was that?" said Grandmamma, who is not really deaf, but when in a tight place likes to gain time by this harmless imposition.

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 …

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.

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

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 …

"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 …

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.

The art of life...is to be thought odd. Everything will then be permitted to you.

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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

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 can become of book-hunting...if everything is reprinted in uniform binding for a shilling or sixpence?