Quotes by Biographers - Page 2

For when I trace back the years I have liv'd, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer'd Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse.
Peter Ackroyd
What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of "The Purloined Letter" successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet and a mathematician. Dupin is able to find it because he too meets both conditions.
Vincent Buranelli
This Earle of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. On his returne the Queen welcomed him home, and sayd, My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.
John Aubrey
Conscience is a treacherous thing and mine behaves badly whenever there is a serious danger of being found out.
Margaret Lane
Again and again in his career, Hamilton committed the same political error: he never knew when to stop, and the resulting excesses led him into irremediable indiscretions.
Ron Chernow
Happiness ... is achieved only by making others happy.
Stuart Cloete
I like the man who faces what he must With steps triumphant and a heart of cheer Who fights the daily battle without fear.
Sarah Knowles Bolton
The past is a funeral gone by.
Edmund Gosse
absinthe removes the bitter taste of failure and grants me strange visions which are charming principally because they cannot be written down. Only in absinthe do I become entirely free and, when I drink it, I understand the symbolic mysteries of odour and of colour.
Peter Ackroyd
The Lord Chief Justice of England recently said that the greater part of his judicial time was spent investigating collisions between propelled vehicles each on its own side of the road each sounding its horn and each stationary.
Philip Guedalla
Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.
Richard Davenport-Hines
Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? … It is certainly not lions and wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace. But nothing abashed us, not the flower-like tinting of the flesh, not the persuasiveness of the harmonious voice, not the cleanliness of their habits or the unusual intelligence that may be found in the poor wretches. No, for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being.
Plutarch
[Theseus] soon found himself involved in factions and troubles; those who long had hated him had now added to their hatred contempt; and the minds of the people were so generally corrupted, that, instead of obeying commands with silence, they expected to be flattered into their duty.
Plutarch
if one characteristic of Lyndon Johnson was a boundless ambition, another was a willingness, on behalf of that ambition, to make efforts that were also without bounds.
Robert A. Caro
The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so once it becomes the past succeed only in making it seem implausible.
William Manchester
Character is simply habit long enough continued.
Plutarch
In Newcastle, Kurt announced from the stage, “I am a homosexual, I am a drug user, and I fuck pot-bellied pigs,” another classic Cobainism, though only one of his three claims was true.
Charles R. Cross
Then as we passed down this Passage we were knocked against certain Women of the Town, who gave us Eye-language, since there were many Corners and Closets in Bedlam where they would stop and wait for Custom: indeed it was known as a sure Market for Lechers and Loiterers, for tho' they came in Single they went out by Pairs. This is a Showing-room for Whores, I said.And what better place for Lust, Sir Chris. replied, than among those whose Wits have fled?
Peter Ackroyd
At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.
Richard Davenport-Hines
Asked to explain how he became a war hero he (Kennedy) responded, "It was involuntary. They think my boat.
Sally Bedell Smith
Be glad today. Tomorrow may bring tears. Be brave today. The darkest night will pass. And golden rays will usher in the dawn.
Sarah Knowles Bolton
Destruction is like a snow-ball rolled down a Hill, for its Bulk encreases by its own swiftness and thus Disorder spreads.
Peter Ackroyd
I don't like taking from anyone. I'd rather be a giver, though not for any worthy reason. It's about control, obviously. If I give, I control; if I take, I am controlled. If someone offers me something for free I am at once suspicious.
Margaret Forster
The idea of Christian perfection, which began in the ancient monasteries and spread to the world as an ideal, is one of the most appealing, demanding and ultimately hopeless notions of the spiritual life. By definition, only God is perfect—that is, complete and independent unto [God’s] self. Humans, on the other hand, are radically imperfect, and that, paradoxically, is welcome news, for the recognition of our incompleteness throws us on the mercy of God and enables us, as Saint Paul stressed, to put up with one another’s faults.
Donald Spoto
Neither blame or praise yourself.
Plutarch
The gateway to the underworld is seen as part antiquity and part theatre. Welcome to the lower depths.
Peter Ackroyd
And I never started to plow in my lifeThat some one did not stop in the roadAnd take me away to a dance or picnic.t I ended up with forty acres;t I ended up with a broken fiddle—And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,And not a single regret.
Edgar Lee Masters
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
Agnes Repplier
Writers seldom choose as friends those self-centered characters who are never in trouble, never make mistakes, and always count their change as it is handed to them.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
The busiest man is the happiest man.
Sir Theodore Martin
I have studied many timesThe marble which was chiseled for me—A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor.In truth it pictures not my destinationBut my life.For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.And now I know that we must lift the sailAnd catch the winds of destinyWherever they drive the boat.To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness,But life without meaning is the tortureOf restlessness and vague desire—It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.
Edgar Lee Masters
Jealousy knows no logic, nor does it respect reciprocity.
Jean Edward Smith
If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual's pain gained meaning was through its communication to others.
Diane Wood Middlebrook
Be informed, also, that this good and savoury Parish is the home of Hectors, Trapanners, Biters who all go under the general appelation of Rooks. Here are all the Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Night-walkers, Whores, Linnen-lifters, who are like so many Jakes, Privies, Houses of Office, Ordures, Excrements, Easments and piles of Sir-reverence: the whores of Ratcliffe High-way smell of Tarpaulin and stinking Cod from their continuall Traffick with seamen's Breeches. There are other such wretched Objects about these ruined Lanes, all of them lamentable Instances of Vengeance. And it is not strange (as some think) how they will haunt the same Districts and will not leave off their Crimes until they are apprehended, for these Streets are their Theatre. Theft, Whoredom and Homicide peep out of the very Windows of their Souls; Lying, Perjury, Fraud, Impudence and Misery are stamped upon their very Countenances as now they walk within the Shaddowe of my Church.
Peter Ackroyd
The word "fronting" was important to Rob. A coward who acted tough was fronting. A nerd who acted dumb was fronting. A rich kid who acted poor was fronting. Rob found the instinct very offensive, and in college he saw it all around.
Jeff Hobbs
That which is timeless is also the most timely.
Joseph Pearce
It's not macho to read? Nonsense. Reading is a stouthearted activity, disporting courage, keenness, stick-to-itness. It is also, in my experience, one of the most thrilling and enduring delights of life, equal to a home run, a slamdunk, or breaking the four-minute mile.
Irving Stone
Max sent Scottie some literary advice, the same dictum he gave every college student who called on him. He stressed the importance of a liberal arts education but urged her to avoid all courses in writing. "Everyone has to find her own way of writing," he wrote Scottie, "and the source of finding it is largely out of literature.
A. Scott Berg
When I married Mr. Right I didn't know his first name was Always.
Anne Gilchrist
Even if I take him out for three hours every day, and go and chat to him for another hour, that leaves twenty hours for him all alone with nothing to do. Oh, why can't dogs read?
Nancy Mitford
Ours is the country where in order to sell your product you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.
Louis Kronenberger
Good fortune will elevate even petty minds, and gives them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune...
Plutarch
Oswaldo was flummoxed by the fact that his friend could be so quiet, almost embarrassed, about his academic acumen, yet so damn loud and proud of his status as a premier campus drug dealer."I've never met anyone so smart but so fucking dumb," he told Rob.
Jeff Hobbs
I think housework is far more tiring and frightening than hunting is, no comparison, and yet after hunting we had eggs for tea and were made to rest for hours, but after housework people expect one to go on just as if nothing special had happened.
Nancy Mitford
What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?
Peter Ackroyd
Agesilaus the Spartan king was once invited to hear a mimic imitate the nightingale but declined with the comment that he had heard the nightingale itself.
Plutarch
The author describes Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as "seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand.
Robert A. Caro
He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic.
Irving Stone
He believed that every individual was responsible for his conduct on earth, that there was a judge within. Could even a blazingly Christ inflict greater retribution? Could Dante's Charon in his rowboat on the river Acheron whip the miscreants into a deeper, more everlasting hell than man's unvarnished verdict of himself?
Irving Stone
Eisenhower on Patton: "Fundamentally, he is so avid for recognition as a great commander that he won't with ruthlessly suppress any habit that will jeopardize it.
Jean Edward Smith
Chamber music - a conversation between friends.
Catherine Drinker Bowen
I have mo prejudice against the Southern people... They are just what we would ben in their situation. If slavery did not now exits amongst them, they wld not inrtoduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up... I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. (p52)
Russell Freedman
Courage consists not in hazarding without fear but being resolutely minded in a just cause.
Plutarch
He had the desperation, not the courage, to be himself. Once you do that, you can’t go wrong, because you can’t make any mistakes when people love you for being yourself. But for Kurt, it didn’t matter that other people loved him; he simply didn’t love himself enough.
Charles R. Cross
It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man.
Scott Elledge
So long as he was personally present, [Alcibiades] had the perfect mastery of his political adversaries; calumny only succeeded in his absence.
Plutarch
His body had become a companion which seemed always about to leave him: it had its own pains which moved him to pity, and its own particular movements which he tried hard to follow. He had learned from it how to keep his eyes down on the road, so that he could see no one, and how important it was never to look back - although there were times when memories of an earlier life filled him with grief and he lay face down upon the grass until the sweet rank odour of the earth brought him to his senses. But slowly he forgot where it was he had come from, and what it was he was escaping.
Peter Ackroyd
The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle. C. Vann Woodward
Robert A. Caro
Already a connoisseur of boredom, Tony extended his acquaintance with Salisbury's furnished lodgings and the cheap residential hotels of Andover.
Hilary Spurling
Even if Zuma was to develop the authoritarian impulses of a Mugabe, he would be checked—not least by his own party, which set a continental precedent by ousting Thabo Mbeki in 2007, after it felt he had outstayed his welcome by seeking a third term as party president. The ANC appears to have set itself against that deathtrap of African democracy: the ruler for life.
Mark Gevisser