Quotes from Style — F. L. Lucas
1894–1967 England
← All quotes by F. L. Lucas
5 quotes
And how is clarity to be acquired? Mainly by taking trouble; and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.
Style (1955)
Most of us know accurately only what we constantly relearn; memory is a dipsomaniac, needing to be perpetually refreshed.
Style (1955)
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.
Style (1955)
It is, I believe, personality above all that sets Virgil and Horace higher than Catullus and Ovid; Chaucer than Dryden; Shakespeare than his contemporaries. Many Elizabethans could write at times blank verse as enchanting as his; but he alone could conceive a Hamlet or an Imogen.
Style (1955)
A skill once acquired — for example, the power to speak and write and enjoy one’s own language, or another — is less easily lost, more quickly recovered, than mere accumulations of facts. And it seems to me more important to go out into life able to think straight and communicate clearly than even to know — and remember — the contents of every English book since Caedmon. Then, like Medea, even if you lose everything else, you can still feel 'Myself remains'. Whereas stuffed geese, even if stuffed with the Universe, remain geese.
Style (1955)