Biographies Quotes - Page 18

• Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.

  Jane Campion

  Reading, Eight, Years

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• In a world of alternative lifestyle options, strategic life planning becomes of special importance. Like lifestyle patterns, life plans of one kind or another are something of an inevitable concomitant of post-traditional social forms. Life plans are the substantial content of the reflexively organised trajectory of the self. Life-planning is a means of preparing a course of future actions mobilised in terms of the self's biography. We may also speak here of the existence of personal calendars or life-plan calendars, in relation to which the personal time of the lifespan is handled.

  Anthony Giddens

  Life, Mean, Self

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• When I was 8 years old, I made my own encyclopedia of American biography - Johnny Appleseed, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Charles Lindbergh, my pantheon of favorite heroes. Then I would write my own things and sew them together and try to make my own book.

  Douglas Brinkley

  Book, Hero, Writing

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• I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Important, Three, Fiction

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• Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights!; I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you're actively miserable.

  Lauren Groff

  Fighting, Artist, Thinking

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• I love to read different books on completely different subjects at the same time. I cannot focus on one. I read a few pages of literature, then I jump to philosophy and at the same time I'm reading biographies of Mahler.

  Gustavo Dudamel

  Philosophy, Book, Reading

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• For me writing biographies is impossible, unless they are brief and concise, and these are, I feel, the most eloquent.

  Alfred Nobel

  Writing, Impossible, Feels

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• I don't give you editorial control. I want to meet you. I want to interview everybody who's ever known you. I want to see your correspondence. I want to see your bank statements. But you will have no control over what I write. That's why I really believe in the unauthorized biography.

  Kitty Kelley

  Believe, Writing, Giving

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• The difference between authorized and unauthorized biographies is the difference between riding in carriage or squatting in steerage.

  Kitty Kelley

  Differences, Riding, Carriages

  "Unauthorized, But Not Untrue" by Kitty Kelley, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 6, 2010.

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• I would love to do an unauthorized biography about Congress. It's like a secret society up there.

  Kitty Kelley

  Secret, Congress, Secret Society

  "Kelley pulls curtain back on Camelot" by Patrick Gavin, www.politico.com. December 17, 2012.

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• I have believed in the biographies I have written. I truly can tell you that they have influenced our society politically, culturally, socially.

  Kitty Kelley

  Our Society, Written

  "Kelley softens tone in new books" by Patrick Gavin, www.politico.com. February 07, 2013.

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• I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and 'the life of the mind' - and now, such subjects have become my life.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Book, Grandma, Reading

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• Cuvier had even in his address & manner the character of a superior Man, much general power & eloquence in conversation & great variety of information on scientific as well as popular subjects. I should say of him that he is the most distinguished man of talents I have ever known on the continent: but I doubt if He be entitled to the appellation of a Man of Genius.

  Humphry Davy

  Character, Science, Men

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• I've just finished reading some of my early papers, and you know, when I'd finished I said to myself, 'Rutherford, my boy, you used to be a damned clever fellow.' (1911)

  Ernest Rutherford

  Clever, Reading, Science

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• I wish I had my beta-blockers handy.

  James Black

  Science, Wish, Beta

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• I was introduced to Mr. Davy, who has rooms adjoining mine (in the Royal Institution); he is a very agreeable and intelligent young man, and we have interesting conversation in an evening; the principal failing in his character as a philosopher is that he does not smoke.

  John Dalton

  Character, Science, Intelligent

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• I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.

  G. H. Hardy

  Science, Past, Oxford

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.148, Cambridge University Press

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• I remember my father had a sermon he used to preach when we were in Florida, in which he gave a reference to the Southern Cross-about the stars, the colors, in the Southern Cross, which thrilled me very much. I must have been around 5 years old. ... Now, it turns out that the Southern Cross itself does have one red star, together with three blue ones.

  William Wilson Morgan

  Stars, Father, Science

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• I possess every good quality, but the one that distinguishes me above all is modesty.

  Charles Richet

  Science, Quality, Modesty

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• I have the vagary of taking a lively interest in mathematical subjects only where I may anticipate ingenious association of ideas and results recommending themselves by elegance or generality.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Science, Ideas, May

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• There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.

  Orson Welles

  Interesting, Biographers

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• I had lost faith in biography.

  A. N. Wilson

  Lost, Lost Faith

  "I'm Mr Evil". Interview with Matt Seaton, www.theguardian.com. September 3, 2003.

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• Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

  Virginia Woolf

  Giving, Creative, Add

  Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.232, OUP Oxford

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• The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.

  Christine Quinn

  Dog, Kings, School

  "Leave a Place Setting for Ann". Interview with Philip Galanes, www.nytimes.com. May 9, 2013.

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• Formerly Milton's Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton.

  Charles Darwin

  Science, Paradise, Voyages

  Charles Darwin (2010). “The Works of Charles Darwin, Volume 29: “Erasmus Darwin” by Ernest Krause, with a Preliminary Notice by Charles Darwin; “The Autobiography of Charles Darwin” Edited by Nora Barlow; and Consolidated Index”, p.118, NYU Press

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