Frasi di Lytton Strachey (16 frasi) | Citazioni e frasi celebri

Lytton Strachey: 16 citazioni2 Mi piace

Lytton Strachey frasi celebri

“[Ultime parole sul letto di morte] Se questo è morire, allora non mi pare gran cosa.”

“La verità senza interpretazione è inutile come l'oro falso. E l'arte è l'interprete per eccellenza.”

“Quando ero giovane credevo che il nostro sviluppo si interrompesse dopo i trent'anni. Invece le cose mi sembrano sempre più interessanti. Man mano che si va avanti si acquista una maggiore padronanza della vita – di quel che si vuole e di quel che si può ottenere – e del materiale di lavoro, che dà un gran senso di sicurezza e di potenza.”

Lytton Strachey

“Scrivere bene una vita è difficile quanto viverla.”

Lytton Strachey

“L'arte della biografia sembra vivere un momento piuttosto nefasto in Inghilterra. Bisogna riconoscere che, nonostante alcuni capolavori, non abbiamo mai avuto una grande tradizione biografica, pari a quella francese; non abbiamo avuto i Fontenelle né i Condorcet, con i loro incomparabili éloges, capaci di condensare in poche brillanti pagine le multiformi esistenze umane. Da noi, il più delicato e umano di tutti i rami dell'arte dello scrivere è stato trattato da letterati del mestiere; non riflettiamo sul fatto che scrivere bene una vita è forse difficile quanto viverla bene.”

Lytton Strachey

Origine: Dalla prefazione https://books.google.it/books?id=2AvhBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT7 di Eminenti vittoriani, traduzione di Ilaria Tesei, Lit Edizioni, Roma, 2014. ISBN 8868269546

Lytton Strachey: Frasi in inglese

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our more complicated interests, our more elusive moods, their small bright world is apt to seem uninteresting and out of date, unless we spend some patient sympathy in the discovery of the real charm and the real beauty that it contains.”

Help us translate this quote

Lytton Strachey libro Landmarks in French Literature

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Lytton Strachey

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

“If this is dying, then I don't think much of it.”

Help us translate this quote

Lytton Strachey

Reported in Michael Holroyd Lytton Strachey (1967-68) Vol. 2, part 2, ch. 6.
Said on his deathbed.

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

Help us translate this quote

Lytton Strachey

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

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

“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.”

Help us translate this quote

Lytton Strachey libro Eminent Victorians

Preface.
Eminent Victorians (1918)

“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 resentful of his tittering.”

Help us translate this quote

Lytton Strachey

George Lyttelton, letter to Rupert Hart-Davis, October 23, 1957, in The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters Vols. 1 & 2 (1985) p. 374. ISBN 0719542464.
Criticism

“The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. … With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters; we do not reflect that it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.”

Help us translate this quote

Lytton Strachey libro Eminent Victorians

Preface.
Eminent Victorians (1918)

“[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."”

Help us translate this quote

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.

“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 – ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.”

Help us translate this quote

Lytton Strachey libro Eminent Victorians

Preface.
Eminent Victorians (1918)

“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 an agreeable intellectual pastime, which flattered his sense of superiority both to his subject and to the illusion-ridden mob.”

Help us translate this quote

Lytton Strachey

Hugh Kingsmill The Progress of a Biographer (1949) p. 7.
Criticism