Biography Quotes

“You have a life; make a success of it.”
― Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

“But artists didn't need to achieve "firsts", and Hughes wanted to be an artist.”
― Diane Middlebrook, Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath - A Marriage

“There were two worlds, two lives, for each person: this one--brief, narrow, finite; and the hereafter-- eternal, limitless, infinite. Fame, to mean anything, should go with one into the next world, where one could enjoy it perpetually.”
― Courtney Anderson, To the Golden Shore: The Life of Adoniram Judson

“In many ways. . .the completeness of biography, the achievement of its professionalization, is an ironic fiction, since no life can ever be known completely, nor would we want to know every fact about an individual. Similarly, no life is ever lived according to aesthetic proportions. The "plot" of a biography is superficially based on the birth, life and death of the subject; "character," in the vision of the author. Both are as much creations of the biographer, as they are of a novelist. We content ourselves with "authorized fictions.”
― Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form

“It is indeed strange, given the heavy emphasis placed by chroniclers on Churchill's sheer magnitude of personality, that the ingredient of pure ambition should be so much ignored or even disallowed.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“No man is a caricature, no individual can alone bear responibilty for a nation's collapse. The disaster Zaire became, the dull acquiescence of its people, had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference, as basic in motivation as it was elevated in rhetoric. The momentum behind Zaire's free-fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad.”
― Michala Wrong, In the footsteps of Mr Kurtz

“After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it’s communication.”
― William L. Stull

“The abscess is a distant memory. The pain is gone. This dinner with her hosts and her health-care team, this week of seeing another country and another culture, this time of being in demand, this moment is reality. I am a lucky girl, (Judy) thinks.”
― Shireen Jeejeebhoy, Lifeliner: The Judy Taylor Story

“The place’s transformation first to a military hospital, and then to an asylum for older adults, the sick, and those disowned by families, appealed to my sense of recreational fear. It rendered the history of the dungeon with its myriad cells into which the authorities threw patients with mental illness and rebels horrifying; and the bathroom that had seen atrocities of all sorts, including murder and suicides, fascinating. I couldn't wait to be inside the building.”
― DR NEETHA JOSEPH, A Recusant’s Incarnation: A Memoir

“The pursuit of transcribing municipal documents ranging from 1860s to 1920s introduced me to Trove’s digital gazettes and newspapers. Trove assisted me in unraveling
the fascinating stories of fearless convicts who rebelled against unfair conditions and refused to comply with the authorities’ orders; stories of issues raised and resolved by the Kew council’s councilors, with the
locales and expenses recorded in communications written in stylish yet
illegible handwriting, different spellings, and abbreviations; and stories of meetings, its dates, venues, and list of attendees, what the attendees discussed, finalized, signed and sealed.”
― DR NEETHA JOSEPH, A Recusant’s Incarnation: A Memoir

“Appreciable moments in life marked the fulfilment of longstanding aspirations leading to one's emancipation from phobias about solitary odyssey and mental entrapment. My liberation from inescapable circumstances came as a planned getaway to Byron Bay, which seemed like biting the bullet on the surface. However, the trip was an absolute necessity for my rebound from failings inflicted by antagonists.”
― DR NEETHA JOSEPH, A Recusant’s Incarnation: A Memoir

“I now prefer to go without food for sometimes than to be always full of food. Fasting has a way of refining a person's character and bringing him or her to a place of reasoning. But to be always full of food is to be a fool! Too much of food is equal to a big fool!”
― A J Osilama

“No one ever get to the future God has planned for him or her without following the process He has put in place to get there. If you believe in God's plan for your life, you must also believe in His process.”
― A J Osilama, UNVEILING THE HIDDEN TREASURES OF WISDOM

“To my deep regret, Patrick was directly related to this, as he became “patient zero” in the Maria Butina case working for the FBI against me. However, when Patrick figured out what was happening behind the scenes and how both he and I were simply being used in Barack Obama’s political games, he went public and told the truth about his role in this case, and the dirty games of the American deep state.”
― Patrick Byrne, Danger Close: Domestic Extremist #1 Comes Clean

“From his example in this respect, I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred. I learned that assistance given to the weak makes the one who gives it strong, and that oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak.

It is now long ago that I learned this lesson from General Armstrong, and resolved that I would permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”
― Booker T. Washington

“JOHNNY AND JAZZBO IS NOT JUST A BOOK TO READ, BUT A JOURNEY TO LIVE!”
― Kathryn J. Hardy, Johnny and Jazzbo

“I looked again at the heap of quilts. An hour ago they had been patchwork, and nothing more. But now! The old woman's words had wrought a trans formation in the homely mass of calico and silk and worsted. Patchwork? Ah, no! It was memory, imagination, history, biography, joy, sorrow, philosophy, religion, romance, realism, life, love, and death; and over all, like a halo, the love of the artist for his work and the soul's longing for earthly immortality.”
― Eliza Calvert Hall, Aunt Jane of Kentucky

“At trial, it became clear that in the macho, mustache-man world of drug-trafficking, Chapo had as much use for women, seducing them with saccharine forevers, then putting them to work in his stable—as buyers, as Blackberry-tapping go-betweens to preserve his anonymity on deals—involving their family members because there’s no glue stronger than blood.”
― Phoebe Eaton, IN THE THRALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING: The Secret History of EL CHAPO, the World’s Most Notorious Narco

“Phoebe Eaton is a talented writer.”
― Gloria Steinem

“I unveiled the cassette ostentorium: 'Take this, all of you, and rock. This is the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you, and for all who rock, so that rock may be worshiped and glorified.”
― Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time

“There are infinite ways of telling the truth, including fiction, and infinite ways of evading the truth, including non-fiction.”
― Jenny Diski, Skating to Antarctica

“We found hell in a beautiful neighborhood.”
― David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

“We fell asleep in my childhood bed. We still hadn’t had sex since we got married, and as I drifted off I wondered how I ever could. I couldn’t fathom joy or pleasure or losing myself in the moment ever again. Maybe because it felt wrong, like a betrayal. If I really loved her, I had no right to feel those things again.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“J'écris peut-être parce qu'on n'avait plus rien à se dire.”
― Annie Ernaux, A Man's Place

“We cannot lose. We win – or we learn.”
― Dr. Donald Steele

“He's a very charming person - very warm and very friendly...I admire the way he interacts with people. That, to me, speaks to the measure of our King.”
― Robert Hardman, Charles III: New King. New Court. The Inside Story.

“The last time I ever tripped, I ate mushrooms I'd grown myself.”
― Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ

“He was not upset with the bear.”
― Jeremy Evans, Mauled: Lessons Learned from a Grizzly Bear Attack

“Dr. Eve Maram's The Schizophrenia Complex is not a book about schizophrenia per se but about the atmosphere surrounding that psychiatric diagnosis.”
― Eve Maram, The Schizophrenia Complex

“ The Schizophrenia Complex: Archetypal Roots and the Role of Eros ”
― Eve Maram, The Schizophrenia Complex