Biographer Quotes

All men now allow that if any human power could have stemmed the avalanche of the French Revolution, it would have been the reforms of Turgot.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall

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

Richard Garnett

The necessitarian falls back upon the experienced reality of facts.

James Anthony Froude

I have switched on this modern laptop machine. And I have told myself that I must resist the temptation to start playing solitaire upon it.

Margaret Drabble

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

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.

She watched the lights upon the shore. The glare that was Plymouth in the distance. She thought, the dance is over. The girls are going out of the overheated hall into the cold air. They shiver; their young men hurry after them. Some have got home and find their dresses stained or torn; yet they've enjoyed themselves. Which is the more important? Wallflowers think of the young men who haven't danced with them; probably each has a dream-day hero. Remember the lieutenant to whom I never spoke a word; yet I married him and had children and grandchildren, though he never knew it. And there are others, madly happy, look in their mirrors and smile and wonder. Even the latest home has a warm bed to go to.

Arthur Calder-Marshall

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.

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

Victoria Glendinning

If you trace up Masonry, through all its Orders, till you come to the grand tip-top head Mason of the World, you will discover that the dread individual and the Chief of the Society of Jesus [i.e., the Superior General of the Jesuit Order] are one and the same person.

The Canadian Identity, it seems, is truly elusive only at home. Beyond the borders Canadians know exactly who they are, within they see themselves as part of a family, a street, a neighbourhood, a community, a province, a region, and on special occasions like Canada Day and Grey Cup weekend and, of course, during the Winter Olympics, a country called Canada. Beyond the borders, they pine; within the borders, they more often whine

Between the villages of Aubiere and Romagnat in the ancient Province of Auvergne there is an old road that comes suddenly over the top of a high hill. To stand south of this ridge looking up at the highway flowing over the skyline is to receive one of those irrefutable impressions from landscape which requires more than a philosopher to explain. In this case it is undoubtedly, for some reason, one of exalted expectation.

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

It was on Good Friday that Miss Bendix lost her faith. She had really lost it before then, but, as is often the case with losses, she did not notice that anything was missing for some time after it had gone.

Naomi Royde-Smith

If you want to know about a man's gifts, you should see him at work, if you want to know about his temper, you should see him at home.

Lord David Cecil

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

Hesketh Pearson

Sometimes I have a terrible feeling that I am dying not from the virus, but from being untouchable.

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.

Measuring is one of the more practical uses of mathematics, but the ability and desire to measure aren't always wrapped up with the need to know useful answers.

All the great people and great things in life are failures. It is in doing what we cannot do but must try to do that humans rise to their exalted fulfillment. Maglie had tried to do with an old man's arm and back what a young man might not have been able to do as well. Of such failures is greatness made.

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.

When will the dead world cease to dream,
When will the morning break?

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

And though it is most certain, that two lutes being both strung and turned to an equal pitch, and then one played upon, the other will warble a faint audible harmony in answer to the same tune: yet many will not believe there is any such thing as sympathy of souls, and I am well pleased that every reader do enjoy his own opinion.