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.

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.

When we advance a little into life, we find that the tongue of man creates nearly all the mischief of the world.

Edwin Paxton Hood

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.

It is clear that the flame of True Freedom had passed with naval supremacy and constitutional, consultative government from the United Provinces to Great Britain, where it was regarded with quite as much national pride.

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.

If I am not pleased with myself, but should wish to be other than I am, why should I think highly of the influences which have made me what I am?

John Lancaster Spalding

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

Victoria Glendinning

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

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

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

Jerry B. Jenkins

The truth is that literature, particularly fiction, is not the pure medium we sometimes assume it to be. Response to it is affected by things other than its own intrinsic quality; by a curiosity or lack of it about the people it deals with, their outlook, their way of life.

The first time you are reconciled to the terrible unfairness of disappointment, you are getting old.

Mary Lee Settle

I think that one of the qualifications of artists should be a vow of celibacy. They should be confined to ruining only their own lives.

Dodgson of course was a meticulous traveler. He packed each article separately, well wrapped in paper to twice its bulk.

Florence Becker Lennon

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

Hesketh Pearson

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.)

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.

You know how some people are - they always feel they have to do things for other people's good, no matter what happens to the other people in the process!

Frances Parkinson Keyes

No man can be satisfied with his attainment, although he may be satisfied with his circumstances.

Frank Arthur Swinnerton

No honest historian can take part with — or against — the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.

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.

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.

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