Biographer Quotes

Mary Shelley

Doris Lessing

Mihajlo Pupin

Izaak Walton

Patricia Cornwell

James Anthony Froude

Walter Isaacson

Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.

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

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

The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.

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.

I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet.

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

For mothers who must earn, there is indeed no leisure time problem. The long hours of earning are increased by the hours of domestic labor, until no slightest margin for relaxation or change of thought remains.

Katharine Anthony

In things greate and extraordinary some perhaps will take notice of God's working, who either forgett or believe not that he takes as well a care and account of their smallest concernments...

Lucy Hutchinson

When people are old enough to know better they are old enough to do worse.

Hesketh Pearson

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

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 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.

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

I eat till, honest, I felt every button on all my clo'es. The folks where we were stayin' were the old-fashioned hospitable kind; they didn't let you off till your jaws struck work and wouldn't wag no more.

Laura E. Richards

The happiest marriages are full of alternative lives, lived in the head, unknown to the partner.

John Bayley (writer)

In my youth I loved climbing and scrambling up rocks and mountains: now I seldom intrude on the dweller of a second story, and my greatest enemy or friend may avoid me altogether on the third; so humbled is the aspiring spirit of my youth.

Edward John Trelawny

Cricket at the highest level has never been simply a demonstration of sporting excellence; it has always been about winning and losing.

Western humor…grew out of a distinct condition—the battle with the frontier.… It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind it.

Albert Bigelow Paine

O, saw ye the lass wi' the bonnie blue een?
Her smile is the sweetest that ever was seen,
Her cheek like the rose is, but fresher, I ween,
She 's the loveliest lassie that trips on the green.

Were Love exempt from the militations of Necessity, he were greater than God and the World.

Richard Garnett

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.

The past is our only real possession in life. It is the one piece of property of which time cannot deprive us; it is our own in a way that nothing else in life is. In a word, we are our past; we do not cling to it, it clings to us.

The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself.

The facts of life are to the biographer what the text of a novel is to the critic.

Victoria Glendinning