20th-century Biographer Quotes

Night fell clean and cold in Dublin, and wind moaned beyond my room as if a million pipes played the air.

Patricia Cornwell

Just as a child is born without fear, so is it born without prejudice. Prejudice, like fear, is acquired.

The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.

One of the penalties of longevity is that some of the dearest and most familiar faces depart, leaving gaps which cannot be filled.

The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.

She imagines herself clean as a fish,
evasive, solitary, dumb. Her prayer:
to make peace with her own monstrous nature.

Elaine Feinstein

Commercial to the core, Elvis was the kind of singer dear to the heart of the music business. For him to sing a song was to sell a song. His G clef was a dollar sign.

Here lies the tremendous mystery - that God should be all-powerful, yet refuse to coerce. He summons us to cooperation. We are honored in being given the opportunity to participate in his good deeds. Remember how He asked for help in performing his miracles: Fill the water pots, stretch out your hand, distribute the loaves.

Elisabeth Elliot

What you're looking at there is my arm, going into the rock... and there it is - stuck. It's been without circulation for 24 hours. It's pretty well gone.

You should climb around inside my brain, Dan. It's like this dark room surrounded by quicksand." "I know what you mean," her brother said quietly. "I hate being in my brain sometimes. I have to get out." "What do you do?" Amy asked. Dan shrugged "I go to other places. My toes. My shoulders. But mostly here." He tapped his chest and immediately reddened. "I know. It's stupid." "Not really," Amy said. "I wish I could do that, too.

(All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadness)

To learn something, to master something, anything, is as sweet as first love.

What first stuns the young writer emerging from college is that there is no clear-cut road for him to travel on. He must chop a path in the wilderness of his own soul, a disheartening process, lifelong and lonesome and therefore, of what use graduate work?

Trust is established by working around horses in an utterly predictable manner.

I would rather be disliked for who I am than to be respected for who I'm not.

Jefferson was the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it.

A prudent silence will frequently be taken for wisdom and a sentence or two cautiously thrown in will sometimes gain the palm of knowledge, while a man well informed but indiscreet and unreserved will not uncommonly talk himself out of all consideration and weight. (Alexander Hamilton's 'thesis on discretion' written to his son James shortly before his fatal duel with Burr.)

Christianity is not a religion, it's a relationship with God through Christ.

Jerry B. Jenkins

And even when success comes, as I am sure it will, bear in mind that there are more quiet and enviable joys than to be among the most sought after women at a ball...

Blanche Wiesen Cook

To be a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. It seems to me it requires not only the tact, patience, and thoroughness of a scholar but the stamina of a horse.

Only by discarding a diet based on rotting corpses could men become sane. The fantasy of needing a blood-diet, a corpse-diet, was inseparable from the distorted relation to the parents I had been trying to clarify in myself and which one way or another existed in everyone. The corpse-eater was still in fantasy feeding on the parents. We discussed these ideas and decided to eat no more meat, no more animal products of any kind (such as milk, cheese, eggs) and to discard mineral salt. Apart from a few extreme applications of our position, when I tried to eat such nauseous things as raw potatoes, we found that we felt very much better in health.

I tried to do it all myself: be mommy and camp counselor and art teacher and prereading specialist (and somehow, in my off-hours, to do my own work). I tried my absolute best. And like so many of the moms around me, I started to go a little crazy.

The increase in the assets of the Federal Reserve Banks from 143 Million dollars in 1913 to 45 Billion dollars in 1949 went directly to the private stockholders of the [Federal Reserve] banks.

Eustace Mullins

Because I have no actual sisters, it is my friends from Ames who've exposed me to every facet of womanhood.

It's okay to be afraid. It's not okay to let the fear STOP you.