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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.
-Andre Maurois
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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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Books about Legacy
