Biographer Quotes

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

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

We would never get away from it.... It's bad enough as it is, but with the wireless telephone one could be called up at the opera, in church, in our beds. Where could one be free from interruption?

You think she's warm, but she's really quite aloof. She gives it all to the camera.

The question is not whether a doctrine is beautiful but whether it is true. When we wish to go to a place, we do not ask whether the road leads through a pretty country, but whether it is the right road.

Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him-the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his own resilient temperament could not dispel.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans.

Van Wyck Brooks

In the love affair, as in sculpture, poetry, and every other fine art, no lasting success can be achieved without skill.

Doris Langley Moore

The biographer must be close enough to sympathize, but far enough away to see clearly, to explain but not to defend or attack. He is literature's high-wire performer. A false step this way or that and he loses his balance — and his book.

Gerald Clarke (author)

We must be willing to change chairs if we want to grow. There is no permanent compatibility between a chair and a person. And there is no one right chair. What is right at one stage may be restricting at another or too soft. During the passage from one stage to another, we will be between two chairs. Wobbling no doubt, but developing.

An adventure differs from a mere feat in that it is tied to the externally unattainable. Only one end of the rope is in the hand, the other is not visible, and neither prayers, nor daring, nor reason can shake it free.

William Bolitho Ryall

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

John Bayley (writer)

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

Patricia Cornwell

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

Victoria Glendinning

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

Piers Paul Read

Criticism prevents art from forgetting, prevents it from sinking into conformity.

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

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.

When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

Listening continuously and taking notes for an hour is an unusual cognitive experience for most young people. Professors should embrace — and even advertise — lecture courses as an exercise in mindfulness and attention building, a mental workout that counteracts the junk food of nonstop social media.