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Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived.
-Anon.
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This is the beginning of a new day.
You have been given this day to use as you will.
You can waste it or use it for good.
What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it.
When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever;in its place is something that you have left behind...
let it be something good.
-Anon.
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My name is `Abdu'l-Bah
-Abdu'l-Bah
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If I have done any deed worthy of remembrance, that deed will be my monument. If not, no monument can preserve my memory.
-Agesilaus II
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I
-Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
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The only thing you take with you when you're gone is what you leave behind.
-John Allston
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Biography is one of the new terrors of death.
-John Arbuthnot
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Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
-W. H. Auden
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Biography should be written by an acute enemy.
-Arthur Balfour
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Every man
-P. T. (Phineas Taylor) Barnum
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Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.
-Augusto Roa Bastos
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Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
-Hilaire Belloc
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form -- it may be called fleeting or eternal -- is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.
-Walter Benjamin
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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
-John Berger
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In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.
-Catherine Drinker Bowen
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A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.
-Fawn M. Brodie
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Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.
-Italo Calvino
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When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.
-Elias Canetti
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Such reproductions may not interest the reader; but after all, this is my autobiography, not his; he is under no obligation to read further in it; he was under none to begin. A modest or inhibited autobiography is written without entertainment to the writer and read with distrust by the reader.
-Neville Cardus
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A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
-Thomas Carlyle
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History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
-Thomas Carlyle
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If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.
-Thomas Carlyle
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No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.
-Thomas Carlyle
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There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.
-Raymond Chandler
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I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.
-Kurt Cobain
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We were meant to give our lives away. Spend more time living your legacy instead of worrying about leaving it.
-Lee J. Colan
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An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
-Quentin Crisp
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We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.
-Edward Dahlberg
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Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.
-Salvador Dali
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I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.
-Rene Descartes
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Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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When my journal appears, many statues must come down.
-Duke of Wellington Arthur Wellesley
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The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.
-Leon Edel
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My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan's life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.
-Barbara Ehrenreich
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It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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There is properly no history; only biography.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Feedom has never been free ... I love my children and I love my wife with all my heart. And I would die, die gladly, if that would make a better life for them.
-Medgar Evers, June 7, 1963
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We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
-Richard Feynman
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Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.
-Louis Fischer
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That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.
-Benjamin Franklin
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The surrounding that householders crave are glorified autobiographies.
-T. H. Gibblings
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Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.
-Edward Gibbon
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Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.
-Kahlil Gibran, "A Handful of Sand on the Shore"
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February 13, 1951. No! I cannot claim that with the end of this notebook, of the notebook, all will be settled, that all will have been done. Perhaps I will have the desire to add to this again. To add something. To add. Perhaps. To add to this again at the last moment
http://www.adpf.asso.fr/adpf-publi/folio/textes/gide_ang.rtf
-Andr, the source for this writes: Six days before his death, Gide writes, on a separate sheet of paper
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I don't think anybody should write his autobiography until after he's dead.
-Samuel Goldwyn
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Autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less reprehensible.
-John Grigg
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Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.
-Philip Guedalla
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An autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.
-Barbara G. Harris
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We change the world not by what we say or do, but as a consequence of what we have become.
-David R. Hawkins
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I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I. -men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
-Ernest Hemingway
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If the reviewing of books be... an ungentle craft, the making of them is, for the most part, a dishonest one -- and that department of literature which ought to be entrusted to those only who are distinguished for their moral qualities is, not infrequently, in the hands of authors totally devoid of good taste, good feeling, and generous sentiment. The writers of Lives have, in our time, assumed a license not enjoyed by their more scrupulous predecessors -- for they interweave the adventures of the living with the memoirs of the dead; and, pretending to portray the peculiarities which sometimes mark the man of genius, they invade the privacy and disturb the peace of his surviving associates.
-John Cam Hobhouse
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The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.
-Eric Hoffer
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America loves the representation of its heroes to be not just larger than life, but stupendously, awesomely bigger than anything else. If blue whales built statues to each other they'd be smaller then these.
-Simon Hoggart
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A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.
-Richard Holmes
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Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.
-Horace
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Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.
-Samuel Johnson
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Monuments are the grappling-irons that bind one generation to another.
-Joseph Joubert
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Even if I was well - I must make myself as good a Philosopher as possible. Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake I have found other thoughts intrude upon me. If I should die, said I to myself, I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.
http://englishhistory.net/keats/letters/brawnefebruary1820.html
-John Keats, Letter to Fanny Brawne, February, 1820
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On the trail of another man, the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn; any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.
-Paul Murray Kendall
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The record of one's life must needs prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written.
-Sister Elizabeth Kenny
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I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
-Henry Kissinger
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Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the last generation.
-Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862
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A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.
-Andr
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Memoirs are the backstairs of history.
-George Meredith
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I suppose that everyone of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next.
-A.A. (Alan Alexandra) Milne
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The first thing to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to examine the stubs of his victim's check-books.
-Silas Weir Mitchell
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Deeds, not stones, are the true monuments of the great.
-John L. Motley
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Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
-Jos
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Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
-George Orwell
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All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.
-Dorothy Parker
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There will be some trouble about 'biography' because I have never troubled myself to supply particulars of my early life to any writer.
-Sir Arthur Wing Pinero
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I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.
-Katherine Anne Porter
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When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do -- well, that's Memoirs.
-Will Rogers
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There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs.
-Will Rogers
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I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.
-Philip Roth
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It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
-Philip Roth
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Members rise from CMG (known sometimes in Whitehall as Call Me God) to KCMG (Kindly Call Me God) to GCMG (God Calls Me God).
-Anthony Sampson
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In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching...
-Paul A. Samuelson
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He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times.
-Friedrich von Schiller
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Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land.
This text appeared in the Seattle Sunday Star on Oct. 29, 1887, in a column by Dr. Henry A. Smith. Smith took notes as Seattle spoke and created this text in English from those notes.
-Chief Seattle, text of Chief Seattle's Treaty Oration (1854), "Originally published in the Seattle Sunday Star", October 29, 1887
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Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two.
-Ellery Sedgwick
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The facts of a person's life will, like murder, come out.
-Norman Sherry
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What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?
-Logan Pearsall Smith
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A good character is the best tombstone. Those who loved you, and were helped by you, will remember you when forget-me-nots are withered. Carve your name on hearts, and not on marble.
-C. H. (Charles Haddon) Spurgeon
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When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered, Bob Hope should be high on the list. This man drives himself and is driven. It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective. He works month after month at a pace that would kill most people.
-John Steinbeck, Once There Was A War, New York: Bantam, p.65., 1958
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The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
-George Steiner
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Once in Persia reigned a king
Who upon his signet ring
Graved a maxim true and wise,
Which he held before the eyes
Gave him counsel at a glance
Fit for every change and chance.
Solemn words, and these are they:
Even this shall pass away.
-Theodore Tilton, The King's Ring (All Things Shall Pass Away)
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Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.
-Mark Twain
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There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
-Mark Twain
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We all leave footprints in the sand, the question is, will we be a big heal, or a great soul.
-Source Unknown
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There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people, if he's any good.
-Source Unknown
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Your descendants shall gather your fruits.
-Virgil, Eclogues, no. 9, l. 50 (37 B.C.)
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For what is a poem, but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding. It is the deepest part of autobiography.
-Robert Penn Warren
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Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyze yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.
-Evelyn Waugh
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Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
-Evelyn Waugh
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To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.
-Simone Weil
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When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.
-Simone Weil, La Table Ronde Human Personality, 1950
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All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
-Rebecca West
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Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
-Rebecca West
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If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.
-Oscar Wilde
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I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.
-Oscar Wilde
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Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
-Oscar Wilde
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Biography is a higher gossip.
-Robert Winder
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Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.
-Virginia Woolf
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Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
-Virginia Woolf
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Books about Legacy
