20th-century Biographer Quotes

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

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

Patricia Cornwell

I admit that I also yearn to leave my mark on society, and not see machines or people trample it foolishly.
On the one hand it's only shit; on the other, shit's shit, and what we desire in the world is less, not more, of it.

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

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.)

Sins become more subtle as you grow older. You commit sins of despair rather than lust.

Piers Paul Read

The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.

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.