Biographies Quotes - Page 15

• Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

  Adrienne Rich

  Memories, Lying, Letters

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• Tycho, we're about to achieve a tremendous victory we don't want." "We'll put that in your biography. General Antilles was so good he couldn't fail when he tried to." "Thanks." Wedge & Tycho

  Aaron Allston

  Victory, Want, Thanks

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• I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

  Don DeLillo

  Hurt, Writing, Want

  Don DeLillo (2004). “Cosmopolis: A Novel”, p.150, Simon and Schuster

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• I thought of the one thing about home that I missed, my dad's study with its built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves sagging with thick biographies and the black leather chair that kept me just uncomfortable enough to keep from feeling sleepy as I read.

  John Green

  Dad, Home, Feelings

  John Green (2015). “Looking For Alaska Special 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.65, Penguin

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• According to Nietzche," said a sharp new voice, making them all jump, "philosophy is the biography of the philosopher.

  J. K. Rowling

  Philosophy, Voice, Philosopher

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• But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.

  John Green

  People, Lasts, Last Words

  John Green (2015). “Looking For Alaska Special 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.100, Penguin

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• unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Unloved

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Articles, Letters, Plays & Screenplays: From the author of The Great Gatsby, The Side of Paradise, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and many other notable works”, p.595, e-artnow

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• A surprising number [of novels] have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily-against which a law ought to be passed.

  Charles Darwin

  Science, Law, Numbers

  Charles Darwin (2016). “Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: the Evolution”, p.63, VM eBooks

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• What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Science, Knows, Immense

  "Budget of Paradoxes". Book by Augustus De Morgan, 1866.

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• ...a man estimable for his learning, amiable for his life, and venerable for his piety. Arbuthnot was a man of great comprehension, skilful in his profession, versed in the sciences, acquainted with ancient literature, and able to animate his mass of knowledge by a bright and active imagination; a scholar with great brilliance of wit; a wit who, in the crowd of life, retained and discovered a noble ardour of religious zeal.

  Samuel Johnson

  Religious, Science, Men

  Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt (1854). “Johnson's Lives of the British Poets”, p.205

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• We have chosen to write the biography of our disease because we love it platonically - as Amy Lowell loved Keats - and have sought its acquaintance wherever we could find it. And in this growing intimacy we have become increasingly impressed with the influence that this and other infectious diseases, which span - in their protoplasmic continuities - the entire history of mankind, have had upon the fates of men.

  Hans Zinsser

  Writing, Fate, Men

  Hans Zinsser (2011). “Rats, Lice and History”, p.6, Transaction Publishers

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• One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

  Carlos Fuentes

  Writing, Like You, Gravestone

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• There will be some trouble about 'biography' because I have never troubled myself to supply particulars of my early life to any writer.

  Arthur Wing Pinero

  Legacy, Trouble, Early Life

  Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (1917). “The Social Plays of Arthur Wing Pinero”

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• I've always been fascinated by books. When I was young, my grandfather used to hand out a book - which would be anything from a biography to a classic - to me every week and ask me to write a piece on what I thought about it. On the other hand, my mother used to love reading thrillers and bestsellers.

  Ashwin Sanghi

  Mother, Book, Reading

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• Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Poetry, Myth

  Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.213, New World Library

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• To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Leadership, Fate

  Albert Einstein (2002). “Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein's letters to and from children”

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• Unusual financial activity: none, unless you count the fact that someone in the family is way too into Civil War biographies. (Can this be a possible indication of Confederate insurgents still living and working in Virginia? Must research further.)

  Ally Carter

  War, Virginia, Research

  Ally Carter (2007). “I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You”, Hyperion

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• There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  People, Novelists, Ifs

  "The Complete Short Stories, Essays, and a Play".

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• From the biography of Freud, by Irving Stone, said by Freud's fiance after he teased her for being sweet, "Beware of truly sweet people. They have will of iron.

  Irving Stone

  Sweet, Iron, People

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• That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.

  Barack Obama

  Teaching, Self, Issues

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams From My Father”, p.190, Canongate Books

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• A raznochinets needs no memory—it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.

  Osip Mandelstam

  Memories, Book, Needs

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• It sometimes happens that the town child is more alive to the fresh beauty of the country than a child who is country born. My brother and I were born in London...but our descent, our interest and our joy were in the north country'. Quoted in The Tale of Beatrix Potter a Biography by Margaret Lane, First Edition p 32-33

  Beatrix Potter

  Country, Brother, Children

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• The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books--great, big, fat ones--French and German as well as English--history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much.

  Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Girl, Book, English History

  Frances Hodgson Burnett (2016). “A Little Princess”, p.9, Xist Publishing

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• ...I believe there exists, & I feel within me, an instinct for the truth, or knowledge or discovery, of something of the same nature as the instinct of virtue, & that our having such an instinct is reason enough for scientific researches without any practical results ever ensuing from them.

  Charles Darwin

  Believe, Knowledge, Science

  Charles Darwin, Frederick Burkhardt, Sydney Smith (1985). “The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: 1847-1850”, p.128, Cambridge University Press

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• I am almost thanking God that I was never educated, for it seems to me that 999 of those who are so, expensively and laboriously, have lost all before they arrive at my age-& remain like Swift's Stulbruggs-cut and dry for life, making no use of their earlier-gained treasures:-whereas, I seem to be on the threshold of knowledge.

  Edward Lear

  Knowledge, Science, Cutting

  L. Candace Pezzera, Edward Lear, Rhode Island School of Design. Museum of Art (1982). “How pleasant to know Mr. Lear: watercolors by Edward Lear from Rhode Island collections”

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