Over Bemerton's: An Easy-Going Chronicle

“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. . . .””

— E. V. Lucas

“She doesn't love you because of anything”

— E. V. Lucas

“. . . 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.””

— E. V. Lucas

“None the less, the more I revolved the matter that evening the more did 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.””

— E. V. Lucas

“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.””

— E. V. Lucas

“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.””

— E. V. Lucas

“He was born in 1770, in what he thought the best of all lands”

— 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 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?””

— E. V. Lucas

“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.””

— E. V. Lucas