Make Way for Lucia Quotes

“These invitations were couched in Chesterfield terms: Mr. Wyse said that he had met a mutual friend just now who had informed him that you were in residence, and had encouraged him to hope that you might give him the pleasure of your company, etc. This was alluring diction: it presented the image of Mr. Wyse stepping briskly home again, quite heartened up by this chance encounter, and no longer the prey to melancholy at the thought that you might not give him the joy.”
― E.F. Benson, Complete Mapp & Lucia

“Bits of exultation kept peeping out, and Lucia kept poking them back.”
― E.F. Benson, Complete Mapp & Lucia

“He told himself that he was not drunk at all, but that he had taken an unusual quantity of whisky, which seemed to produce much the same effect as intoxication.”
― E.F. Benson, Mapp And Lucia (Complete Collection)

“She could trim a hat with a toothbrush and a banana in such a way that it looked quite Parisian till you firmly analysed its component parts, and most of her ingenuity was devoted to dress: the more was the pity that she had such a roundabout figure that her waistband always reminded you of the equator . .”
― E.F. Benson, Mapp And Lucia (Complete Collection)

“Vermouth always makes me brilliant unless it makes me idiotic, but we'll hope for the best.”
― E.F. Benson, Mapp And Lucia (Complete Collection)

“she believed in God in much the same way as she believed in Australia, for she had no doubt whatever as to the existence of either, and she went to church on Sunday in much the same spirit as she would look at a kangaroo in the Zoological Gardens, for kangaroos come from Australia.”
― E.F. Benson, Mapp And Lucia (Complete Collection)

“My dear, it is just busy people that have time for everything.”
― E.F. Benson, Mapp And Lucia (Complete Collection)

“Mrs. Alingsby was tall and weird and intense, dressed rather like a bird-of-paradise that had been out in a high gale, but very well connected. She had long straight hair which fell over her forehead, and sometimes got in her eyes, and she wore on her head a scarlet jockey-cap with an immense cameo in front of it. She hated all art that was earlier than 1923, and a considerable lot of what was later. In music, on the other hand, she was primitive, and thought Bach decadent: in literature her taste was for stories without a story, and poems without metre or meaning. But she had collected round her a group of interesting outlaws, of whom the men looked like women, and the women like nothing at all, and though nobody ever knew what they were talking about, they themselves were talked about. Lucia had been to a party of hers, where they all sat in a room with black walls, and listened to early Italian music on a spinet while a charcoal brazier on a blue hearth was fed with incense… Lucia’s general opinion of her was that she might be useful up to a point, for she certainly excited interest.”
― E.F. Benson, Complete Mapp and Lucia

“I don't see how the baby is the result of gambling," said Georgie. "Unless he bet he wouldn't have one.”
― E.F. Benson, Mapp And Lucia (Complete Collection)

“would be an insincerity of which Miss Mapp humbly hoped she was incapable, to go into mourning for Diva just because she died.”
― E.F. Benson, Mapp and Lucia: Complete Series

“And who was the man who looked as if he had been labelled 'Man' by mistake when he was born, and ought to have been labelled 'Lady'? I never saw such a perfect lady, though I only know him as Stephen at present. She just said, 'Stephen, do you know Lady Brixton?”
― E.F. Benson, Mapp and Lucia: Complete Series