F.L. Lucas Quotes & Sayings

I have a wife, I have sons; all these hostages have I given to fortune. — F.L. Lucas

The most emphatic place in a clause or sentence is the end. This is the climax; and, during the momentary pause that follows, that last word continues, as it were, to reverberate in the reader's mind. It has, in fact, the last word. — F.L. Lucas

Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among 'intellectuals', that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus to end by enjoying almost nothing in literature but one's own opinions, while oneself incapable of writing a living sentence. — F.L. Lucas

Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly ... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails. — F.L. Lucas

The simile sets two ideas side by side; in the metaphor they become superimposed. — F.L. Lucas

The more populous the world and the more intricate its structure, the greater must be its fundamental insecurity. A world-structure too elaborately scientific, if once disrupted by war, revolution, natural cataclysm or epidemic, might collapse into a chaos not easily rebuilt. — F.L. Lucas

Since in the long run deception is likely to be found out, your character had better not only seem good, but be it. — F.L. Lucas

The only hope I can see for the future depends on a wiser and braver use of the reason, not a panic flight from it. — F.L. Lucas

A writer should remember that about his muse there is a great deal of the Siren. He should view his mental offspring as relentlessly as a Spartan father - if it is not perfectly sound, let it be cast out. — F.L. Lucas

Most style is not honest enough. — F.L. Lucas

It seems to me as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one's reading, as logs of voyagesor photographs of one's travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption. — F.L. Lucas

And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them. — F.L. Lucas

At Munich we sold the Czechs for a few months grace, but the disgrace will last as long as history. — F.L. Lucas

The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn ... tired of common sense and civilization. — F.L. Lucas

This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null. — F.L. Lucas

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears. — F.L. Lucas

A man can make himself put down what comes, even if it seems nauseating nonsense; tomorrow some of it may not seem wholly nonsense at all. — F.L. Lucas

It is unlikely that many of us will be famous, or even remembered. But not less important than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the world from running backward; who guard and maintain the ancient values, even if they do not conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph it is to pass on what they inherited from their fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can hand on the torch, and not let it down; content to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who know us and to be forgotten when they in their turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its stars. — F.L. Lucas