Biographies Quotes - Page 6

• I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

  Robert Caro

  Believe, Writing, Trying

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• A damnably readable, streamlined, yet deeply researched work. Skipping the ancestors and aftermath of conventional biography, Max gives us the man, his work, and his times-the niceties of which (so complicated, so exquisitely intertwined) Max articulates with, well, Wallace-like lucidity and wit. Above all this is the story of a touching young man who insisted on being something better than simply the smartest person in the room.

  Blake Bailey

  Men, Giving, Touching

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• I would recommend you watch the movie 'Jobs' starring Ashton Kutcher, if you don't have time to read Jobs's biography.

  Gene Simmons

  Inspirational, Jobs, Watches

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• This is a glorious biography ... The time is ripe for a new biography of Edith Wharton of this intimacy and on this scale ... Lee the biographer pursues her subject down every winding corridor, into every hidden passage and dark corner ... Her critical exploration of Edith Whartons work is dazzlingly assured ... A feat of exhaustive research, and finely tuned to Whartons creative achievement at the same time ... [Wharton] could scarcely have failed to be impressed by ... its artistic sympathy, its sonorous depths, and its soaring conception.

  Mark Bostridge

  Dark, Achievement, Creative

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• More than a needed biography of Ehrenburg . . . Tangled Loyalties is a contribution of much significance to our understanding of the history of Russia in Stalin's time and of her relations with the West.

  Robert C. Tucker

  Loyalty, Russia, Tangled

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• It is one of the many merits of this admirable biography of Proust's mother that it invites one to return to the novel with perhaps a fuller understanding of Proust's heredity, hinterland, and upbringing. . . . This fascinating book is full of interesting social and cultural observation, of information about French Jewish life, the position of Jews in society and, of course, the Dreyfus case. But it is essentially a study of one of the most remarkable and fruitful of mother-son relationships. As such it is a book that every Proustian will want to read.

  Allan Massie

  Mother, Book, Son

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• The Revival of 1859 helped to lay the foundations of the modern international and interdenominational missionary structureEvery revival of religion in the homelands is felt within a decade in the foreign mission-fields, and the records of missionary enterprises and the pages of missionary biography following I860 are full of clearest evidence of the stimulating effect of the Revival throughout the world.

  J. Edwin Orr

  Foundation, Missionary, Records

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• You can use a biography to examine political power, but only if you pick the right guy.

  Robert Caro

  Guy, Political, Use

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• Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Book, Writing, Curiosity

  "A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography". Book by Evelyn Waugh, 1964.

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• I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can't interview them, you have a fuller perspective on their whole life after they're gone and people are more willing to talk about them.

  David Maraniss

  Writing, People, Perspective

  Interview with Carlos J. Queirós, www.aarp.org. April, 2006.

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• A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Writing

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2012). “Hyperion”, p.57, Jazzybee Verlag

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• ...learning chiefly in mathematical sciences can so swallow up and fix one's thought, as to possess it entirely for some time; but when that amusement is over, nature will return, and be where it was, being rather diverted than overcome by such speculations.

  Gilbert Burnet

  Science, Overcoming, Amusement

  Gilbert Burnet (1745). “An Exposition of the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England”, p.176

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• In trying to evaluate Hopkins' unique contribution to biochemistry it may perhaps be said that he alone amongst his contemporaries succeeded in formulating the subject. Among others whose several achievements in their own fields may have surpassed his, no one has ever attempted to unify and correlate biochemical knowledge so as to form a comprehensible picture of the cell and its relation to life, reproduction and function.

  Marjory Stephenson

  Science, Unique, Cells

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• One of the grandest figures that ever frequented Eastern Yorkshire was William Smith, the distinguished Father of English Geology. My boyish reminiscence of the old engineer, as he sketched a triangle on the flags of our yard, and taught me how to measure it, is very vivid. The drab knee-breeches and grey worsted stockings, the deep waistcoat, with its pockets well furnished with snuff-of which ample quantities continually disappeared within the finely chiselled nostril-and the dark coat with its rounded outline and somewhat quakerish cut, are all clearly present to my memory.

  William Crawford Williamson

  Memories, Father, Science

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• This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries and from posterity.

  Antoine Lavoisier

  Science, Oxygen, Claims

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• I built the solenoid and with great expectations late one evening I pressed the switch which sent a current of 40 amperes through the coil. The result was spectacular-a deafening explosion, the apparatus disappeared, all windows were blown in or out, a wall caved in, and thus ended my pioneering experiment on liquid hydrogen cooled coils!

  Nicholas Kurti

  Wall, Science, Expectations

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• My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain that alone on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine would not, I suppose, have thus suffered, and if I had to live my life over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use.

  Charles Darwin

  Science, Men, Should Have

  Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Darwin (1898). “The life and letters of Charles Darwin...ed. by his son, Francis Darwin. 2 v”

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• Since my mother is the type that's called schizophrenogenic in the literature-she's the one who makes crazy people, crazy children-I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane.

  Abraham Maslow

  Mother, Children, Crazy

  Attributed to Abraham Maslow in "New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution" by Colin Wilson, 1972.

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• Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death.

  Virginia Woolf

  Death, Men, Giving

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• When asked what he meant by a miracle: Oh, anything with a probability of less than 20%.

  Enrico Fermi

  Science, Miracle, Probability

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• Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.

  Horace

  Hero, Night, Agamemnon

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• Memoirs are the backstairs of history.

  George Meredith

  History, Memoir

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• It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Running, Writing, Reality

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.75, Courier Corporation

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• It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.

  John Dominic Crossan

  Jesus, Historical, Research

  John Dominic Crossan (2010). “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant”, p.28, Harper Collins

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• I have my own biography of Gram Parsons - I don't want to be part of somebody else's.

  Emmylou Harris

  Want, My Own

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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