E. V. Lucas Quotations

One of the most adventurous things left us is to go to bed. For no one can lay a hand on our dreams.

There can be no defence like elaborate courtesy.

Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception.

The art of life is to show your hand.

I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.

You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do.

Americans are people who prefer the Continent to their own country, but refuse to learn its languages.

The French never allow a distinguished son of France to lack a statue.

The art of life is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candor. 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.

Every cat is really the most beautiful woman in the room.

What is literature compared with cooking? The one is shadow, the other is substance.

The world no doubt is the best or most serviceable schoolmaster; but the world's curriculum does not include Latin and Greek.

Women who make men talk better than they are accustomed to are always popular.

I am a believer in punctuality though it makes me very lonely

What kind of life a dog . . . acquires. I have sometimes tried to imagine by kneeling or lying full length on the ground and looking up. The world then becomes strangely incomplete; one sees little but legs.

Every saint has a bee in his halo.

The noise from good toast should reverberate in the head like the thunder of July.

Suspicion of happiness is in our blood.

There is no diplomacy like candor.

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 candor which a skillful male liar can introduce.

A horse's eye disquiets me: it has an expression of alarm that may at any moment be translated into action.

In betting on races, there are two elements that are never lacking - hope as hope, and an incomplete recollection of the past.

To set but a low value upon toast is to expose one's deficiencies in right appreciation.

People in hotels strike no roots. The French phrase for chronic hotel guests even says so; they are called dwellers sur la branche.

There are two words for everything.

Few women and fewer men have enough character to be idle.

Readers of novels are a strange folk, upon whose probable or even possible tastes no wise book-maker would ever venture to bet.

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.

The trouble with marriage is that, while every woman is at heart a mother, every man is at heart a bachelor.

Aig [F.-M. Sir Douglas Haig] 'e don't say much; 'e don't, so to say, say nothin'; but what 'e don't say don't mean nothin', not 'arf. But when 'e do say something--my Gawd!

A genius is a man who does unique things of which nobody would expect him to be capable.