Biographies Quotes - Page 14

• If all history is only an amplification of biography, the history of science may be most instructively read in the life and work of the men by whom the realms of Nature have been successively won.

  Archibald Geikie

  Men, Amplification, May

  Sir Archibald Geikie (1905). “The Founders of Geology”

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• Bob Hope was an entertainment colossus, shrewd and influential well beyond show business. Richard Zoglin's biography captures it all--the public and private Hope.

  Tom Brokaw

  Bob, Entertainment, Influential

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• Are you feeling helpless when you think about the dark roads of the future? Then read the biographies of the great men! Learn their life stories; they will lead you to the light! Buddha will lead you to the light; Gandhi will lead you to the light! Men of wider horizons will broaden our own horizons!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Life, Dark, Thinking

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• I very comprehensively studied Irving Thalberg and his biographies. He's who [Scott] Fitzgerald roughly modeled the character after. He worked for him, as a writer, when he was at MGM. And, of course, I revisited the novel and the politics of MGM and the studio system at the time and familiarized myself with the world. There was a great deal of physical and literary work that went into it.

  Matt Bomer

  Character, Scott Fitzgerald, World

  "Matt Bomer on 'The Last Tycoon' and His Long-Gestating Montgomery Clift Biopic". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. June 28, 2016.

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• Dreadful is a poignant biography of a forgotten man who drank himself to death. It's a brilliant evocation of a self-hating gay novelist in the 1940s whom Gore Vidal once considered a rival.

  Edmund White

  Hate, Gay, Men

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• Usually I read biographies of interesting people. I am not attracted to novels - make-believe, or recreations of what people think life should be.

  Lee Kuan Yew

  Believe, Thinking, People

  "Choosing When To Go". www.lankaweb.com. December 12, 2016.

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• Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That's what you could say about it.

  William Golding

  Men, Paper, Pretending

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• However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

  William Golding

  Novel, Disguise

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.

  William Golding

  Differences, Example, Roles

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Most of society thinks that biography is destiny, that the past equals the future, and of course it does if you live there...but what we really have to remind ourselves is that decision is the ultimate power.

  Tony Robbins

  Inspirational, Past, Destiny

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• Why I love the ancients so much? Aside from everything else, when I read them, the entire past between them and me unfolds at thesame time. The hearts of how many heroes and poets may have been set on fire by Plutarch's biographies which now inspire me with their own and with borrowed flames!

  Franz Grillparzer

  Reading, Hero, Heart

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• As an elected official who comes from the African-American community, there are some similarities. You are always trying to reconcile your own personal biography and affiliations with the demands of the broader democracy. And you need to make sure you are representing everybody.

  Barack Obama

  Always Trying, Community, African American

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• I've published many biographies over the years and enjoyed working with writers on their research, discussing it, thinking about it and how it revealed their subject - and one day the impulse came to me to write a life of someone. I made a long list of possible subjects and [ Barbara] Stanwyck was on the list.

  Victoria Wilson

  Writing, Thinking, Years

  Source: www.classicmoviehub.com

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• Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Creativity, Men, Illustration

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1396, Delphi Classics

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• Siamese twins are interesting because they are the only people who can write a biography and an autobiography at the same time.

  Demetri Martin

  Writing, People, Interesting

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• At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. ... I had not imagined that there was anything so delicious in the world. After I had learned the fifth proposition, my brother told me that it was generally considered difficult, but I had found no difficulty whatsoever. This was the first time it had dawned on me that I might have some intelligence.

  Bertrand Russell

  Brother, Science, Age

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Autobiography”, p.25, Routledge

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• All history is biography.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

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• Always live your life with your biography in mind.

  Marisha Pessl

  Book, Beer, Live Your Life

  Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.58, Penguin

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• I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.

  Philip Roth

  Memories, Bones, Constant

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• Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, People, Giving

  Georg Brand, Virginia Woolf, Koizumi Yakumo, Hernández Felisberto (2017). “ON READING: Le plaisir de lire”, p.34, Pieffe Edizioni via PublishDrive

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• I am tired of the position of the dried-up critic and doubter. The believer is the true full man. (from a biography of James by Robert D. Richardson)

  William James

  Tired, Men, Doubters

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• And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprintit’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania

  Philip Roth

  Reality, Kitchen, Tables

  Philip Roth (1997). “American Pastoral”, p.63, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Writing, Two, People

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• Always live your life with your biography in mind," Dad was fond of saying. "Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly.

  Marisha Pessl

  Dad, Live Your Life, Mind

  Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.58, Penguin

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• And if Henry Higgins is not the most reprehensible character ever written for the stage, that's only because somewhere, somehow, someone is composing a musical biography of Ronald Reagan

  Steve Kluger

  Character, Musical, Stage

  Steve Kluger (2009). “My Most Excellent Year: A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins, and Fenway Park”, p.38, Penguin

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