British Biographer Quotes

Doris Lessing
Richard Garnett
Edward John Trelawny
Hartley Coleridge
Mary Soames
Lord David Cecil
Andrew Motion

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

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.

One of the penalties of longevity is that some of the dearest and most familiar faces depart, leaving gaps which cannot be filled.

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

Doris Langley Moore
Doris Langley Moore
She imagines herself clean as a fish,
evasive, solitary, dumb. Her prayer:
to make peace with her own monstrous nature.

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

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.

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

Richard Garnett
Richard Garnett
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.

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

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...

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.

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

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

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.

Andrew Motion
Andrew Motion
I used to think it was great to disregard happiness, to press on to a high goal, careless, disdainful of it. But now I see that there is nothing so great as to be capable of happiness...

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
Lord David Cecil
The beauty of the picture is an abiding concrete of the painter's vision.

Hartley Coleridge
Hartley Coleridge
Just as there are O.K.-words in conversationship so there are O.K.-people to mention in Newstatesmanship.

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.

A nation's wealth is too serious a matter to be left to the wealthy. The riches of a nation belong to all, to be shared among all for the general welfare.

Before you give advice, that is to say advice which you have not been asked to give, it is well to put to yourself two questions - namely, what is your motive for giving it, and what is it likely to be worth? If these questions were always asked, and honestly answered, there would be less advice given.

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.

Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing