Biographies Quotes - Page 23

• An epic subject requires a writer of epic skill and scope, and we have a perfect pairing in Cleopatra and Stacy Schiff. Absorbing and illuminating, this new biography will endure.

  Jon Meacham

  Epic, Skills, Perfect

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• I wanted to make a film that wasn't just a biography. When you watched it, you actually felt that you watched a movie, that you had an emotional reaction. In order to do that, I felt that I had to really keep myself emotionally raw while working on the film. I had to feel myself crying, so the audience could be moved, too.

  Tamra Davis

  Emotional, Order, Cry

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• If you read any of the biographies on J. Edgar Hoover, you find that they contradict each other more than they agree. Often times, they're often told from a political perspective.

  Clint Eastwood

  Perspective, Political, Over You

  "Clint Eastwood, Leonardo DiCaprio Interview, J. Edgar". MoviesOnline Interview, www.moviesonline.ca.

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• It is told of Faraday that he refused to be called a physicist; he very much disliked the new name as being too special and particular and insisted on the old one, philosopher, in all its spacious generality: we may suppose that this was his way of saying that he had not over-ridden the limiting conditions of class only to submit to the limitation of a profession.

  Lionel Trilling

  Science, Class, Names

  Lionel Trilling, Leon Wieseltier (2009). “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays”, p.425, Northwestern University Press

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• To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense,it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wisdom, Truth, Writing

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.42, Xist Publishing

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• Let no one think that I do not love the old ministers. They were, probably, the best men in their generation, and they deserve that their biographies should fill the pages of the town histories. If I could but hear the "glad tidings" of which they tell, and which, perchance, they heard, I might write in a worthier strain than this.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Writing, Men, Thinking

  Henry David Thoreau (2008). “Cape Cod: Illustrated Edition of the American Classic”, p.48, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.

  Aldous Huxley

  Religious, Past, Thinking

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• The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Self, History

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.207

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• Somebody approached me about writing a biography on me, I told them they were too late.

  Zach Braff

  Writing, Too Late, Late

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• I didn’t think any biography could do justice to one of the few honest-to-goodness geniuses of our time, a walking paradox who wore a cloak of complexity and elusiveness, but Lisa Rogak has done an exemplary job of it.

  Otto Penzler

  Jobs, Thinking, Justice

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• I am not aware that I have deserved any notoriey, and I have no taste for its buzz.

  Alfred Nobel

  Science, Buzz, Taste

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• We love the old saints, missionaries, martyrs, and reformers. Our Luthers, Bunyans, Wesleys and Asburys, etc... We will write their biographies, reverence their memories, frame their epitaphs, and build their monuments. We will do anything except imitate them. We cherish the last drop of their blood, but watch carefully over the first drop of our own.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Memories, Writing, Blood

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• We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents' lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies-all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.

  Angela Carter

  Life, Unique, Emotional

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• The means by which I preserve my own health are, temperance, early rising, and spunging the body every morning with cold water, a practice I have pursued for thirty years ; and though I go from this heated theatre into the squares of the Hospital, in the severest winter nights, with merely silk stockings on my legs, yet I scarcely ever have a cold.

  Astley Cooper

  Morning, Health, Mean

  Sir Astley Cooper (1825). “The Lectures of Sir Astley Cooper: On the Principles and Practice of Surgery”, p.58

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• I'd be happy to have my biography be the stories of my dogs. To me, to live without dogs would mean accepting a form of blindness.

  Thomas McGuane

  Friendship, Dog, Mean

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• A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty is a beautifully written portrait of Eudora Welty and her amazing life. Carolyn J. Brown carries the reader through Welty's long, productive writing career and introduces her family and friends along the way. The book's very readable text, its lovely use of Welty quotes, and its excellent photographs make the work a treasure. This intimate look at Eudora Welty is a welcome addition for her readers.

  William R. Ferris

  Book, Writing, Careers

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• I can still recall vividly how Freud said to me, "My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark" ... In some astonishment I asked him, "A bulwark-against what?" To which he replied, "Against the black tide of mud"-and here he hesitated for a moment, then added of occultism.

  Carl Jung

  Science, Promise, Black

  Carl Gustav Jung (1973). “Memories, dreams, reflections”, Random House Inc

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• Biography is the best form of history.

  Josh Billings

  Form

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