Lytton Strachey Quotes (11 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Works

Eminent Victorians

Lytton Strachey

Landmarks in French Literature

Lytton Strachey

Lytton Strachey: 11 quotes 0 likes

Famous Lytton Strachey Quotes

“It is not [the biographer's] business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them…dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior motives.”

Lytton Strachey book Eminent Victorians

Preface.
Eminent Victorians (1918)

“Pass a person through your mind, with all the documents, and see what comes out. That seems to be your method. Also, choose them, in the first place, because you dislike them.”

Lytton Strachey

Walter Raleigh, letter to Lytton Strachey, May 8, 1918. Published in The Letters of Walter Raleigh (1879-1922) (1926) Vol. 2, p. 479.
Criticism

“Madame, I am the civilization they are fighting for.”

Lytton Strachey

Supposedly said by Strachey in response to a woman who demanded he "fight for civilization" in World War One.
Misattributed

“One observed a number of discordant features – a feminine sensibility, a delight in the absurd, a taste for exaggeration and melodrama, a very mature judgement and then some lack of human substance, some hereditary thinness in the blood that at times gave people who met him an odd feeling in the spine. He seemed almost indecently lacking in ordinariness.”

Lytton Strachey

Gerald Brenan "Bloomsbury in Spain and England", in S. P. Rosenbaum (ed.) The Bloomsbury Group (1995) p. 347.
Criticism

“To us, with our broader outlook, our more complicated interests, our more elusive moods, their small bright world is apt to seem uninteresting and out of date, unless we spend some patient sympathy in the discovery of the real charm and the real beauty that it contains.”

Lytton Strachey book Landmarks in French Literature

Landmarks in French Literature (1912), ch. 4.

“[His reply to the chairman's other stock question, which had previously never failed to embarrass the claimant: "Tell me, Mr. Strachey, what would you do if you saw a German soldier trying to violate your sister?" With an air of noble virtue:] "I would try to get between them."”

Lytton Strachey

Reported in Robert Graves Good-bye to All That (1929), ch. 23.
Said during the First World War to a military tribunal assessing his claim to be treated as a conscientious objector. Variants along the lines of "I should try to interpose my body" are also sometimes quoted.