"The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they’ve been at other times."

"All writers know aspects of life that they take very much for granted, that yet to their readers appear peculiar, special."

"In writing novels I have never been able to place much importance upon the distinction between real and imagined. A novelist, it seems to me, makes as much or as little use of the real world as he needs to project his vision of life."

"God knows how you Protestants can be expected to have any sense of direction," she said. "It's different with us, I haven't been to mass for years, I've got every mortal sin on my conscience, but I know when I'm doing wrong. I'm still a Catholic, it's there, nothing can take it away from me." "Of course, duckie," said Jeremy... "once a Catholic always a Catholic."

"I have no concern for the common man except that he should not be so common."

"April, April, laugh thy girlish laughter, and the moment after, Weep thy girlish tears, April."

"Youth is the time for loving, So poets often say."

"His fiction – radical, satirical, polyvalent, sexually courageous, global – extended the mainstream novel, and led it somewhere else. Still not fully recognized, he was one of Britain's greatest late-twentieth-century writers."

"He had the satisfied countenance of a man who has never succeeded in boring himself."

"The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation."

"One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines."

"London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London."

"What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. For us, the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home; it is really only with other people that we become Irishmen."

"Only those with great ambitions know what great fears drive them forward."

"The smell of the library was always the same – the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as "the steam of the social soup"."

"I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned."

"No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there."

"I read Edward Thomas for a breath of air."

"The simple lack Of her is more to me Than others' presence."

"If I should ever by chance grow rich I'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch, Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater, And let them all to my eldest daughter."

"There is nothing at the end of any road better than may be found beside it."

"The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet."

"I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers—as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero."

"To envy a man is to misunderstand him or yourself."

"Far more I feared all company: too sharp, too rude, Had been the wisest or the dearest human voice. What I desired I knew not, but whate'er my choice Vain it must be, I knew."

"Yes. I remember Adlestrop – The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June."

"The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood This Eastertide call into mind the men, Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should Have gathered them and will do never again."

"I built myself a house of glass: It took me years to make it: And I was proud. But now, alas! Would God someone would break it."

"As well as any bloom upon a flower I like the dust on the nettles, never lost Except to prove the sweetness of a shower."

"I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds, Sniff them and think and sniff again and try Once more to think what it is I am remembering, Always in vain. I cannot like the scent, Yet I would rather give up others more sweet, With no meaning, than this bitter one."

"Crooning. A reprehensible form of singing that established itself in light entertainment music in about the 1930s. It recommended itself at first to would-be singers without voices who were unable to acquire an adequate technique and later to a large public because anything, however inartistic, is likely to become popular if only it is done often enough by a large enough number of people."

"Blues. An American dance stemming from the Foxtrot, the speed of which it reduced and into which it brought a deliberately contrived dismal atmosphere. When Blues are sung their words seem to aim at attaining to the utmost depths of gloom and inanity."

"In future editions many of those who may die in the meantime will, of course, be added. All the same, it is hoped that this announcement will not start an immediate wave of suicide among singers and players."

"I remember how those who had appreciated only the wittily destructive portions of Eminent Victorians rubbed their hands in delighted anticipation of Queen Victoria. Now, the cynical Mr. Strachey would fairly let himself go, with the real Aunt Sally for his target. Mr. Strachey did nothing of the kind. If ever a great character was handled tenderly, with an insight tempered by affection, it was the Queen Victoria of his biography. His beautiful final paragraph was but the culmination of an attitude he had steadily maintained. And it is surely not too much to say that he changed the mind not only of his contemporaries but of his seniors about the central figure of a great era."

"Felt the virtues of the Victorian times so condemned by Mr Strachey. The simple honesties can always be made a butt by the impish unrealiabilites."

"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."

"I've been reading Eminent Victorians... It seems to me downright wicked in its heart."

"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."

"I consider the whole Bloomsbury group—excepting only J. M. Keynes—to be the most overrated literary phenomenon of our times. Above all, Lytton Strachey: Strachey who has recently been accorded a two-volume biography, and whose only achievement was to trivialize history, to empty it of its real content and meaning, in order to raise a few complacent titters from the radical chic of his time."

"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."

"Whether or not its immediate success may be ascribed the post-war disillusionment with formerly accepted values and institutions, Eminent Victorians rapidly and solidly established itself as a biographical classic. Rarely, if ever, had psychological penetration, a talent for dramatic depiction of character, and a brilliant style been employed together to better effect. In the space of two hundred pages, by what Asquith called his "subtle and suggestive art," Strachey succeeded in re-absorbing English biography into the realm of literature. Not that the chorus of acclaim was unanimous or wholehearted. Almost everyone, then and now, was and is willing to grant Strachey stylistic excellence. But in the forty years since the first appearance of Eminent Victorians, the book has been under more or less continuous and vehement attack; and has, in turn, been no less vigorously defended."

"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."

"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."

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