Quote #1

[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.'

More from Lytton Strachey

  1. If this is dying, then I don't think much of it.
  2. The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - …
  3. It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.
  4. 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...d…
  5. His style is perfect joy, and it is only when one has come across a fairer and kindlier handling of one of his victims that one is resentfu…
  6. One observed a number of discordant features - a feminine sensibility, a delight in the absurd, a taste for exaggeration and melodrama, a v…
  7. 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 fi…
  8. To mark a man's faults and failings was, for Johnson, to indicate where he had diverged from his true relation to God; for Strachey it was …

All Lytton Strachey quotes