Biography Quotes

“A friend is someone who can brighten your day with a simple smile, when others try to do it with a thousand words.”
― Beth Nimmo, Rachel's Tears: The Spiritual Journey of Columbine Martyr Rachel Scott

“River smiled sweetly at his tormentors and told them, "If you want to kick my ass, go ahead. Just explain to me why you're doing it."

After a confused pause, one of the skinheads said, "Ah, you wouldn't be worth it."

"We're all worth it, man," River said with a beatific smile. "We're all worth millions of planets and stars and galaxies and universes.”
― Gavin Edwards, Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind

“I encourage anyone who has gone through hardships to look back through their life’s chapters and see what can be turned into a book. For you never know what heartache God, one day, can turn into a redemptive story.”
― Jolina Petersheim

“Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. Therefore — since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what Orlando is doing now — there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar, tell one’s beads, blow one’s nose, stir the fire, look out of the window, until she has done…

Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk…

She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love — as the male novelists define it — and who, after all, speak with greater authority? — has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one’s petticoat and — But we all know what love is…

If then, the subject of one’s biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine, we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“The people have realized that Martial Law is not law. A regime not established by law is devoid of the attribute to dispense law. A regime which puts in a bunker the highest law in the land does not have the moral authority to say that nobody is above the law.”
― Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, If I Am Assassinated

“I would plead into the darkness, where are they, bring them back”
― Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave

“The humanitarian philosophies that have been developed (sometimes under some religious banner and invariably in the face of religious opposition) are human inventions, as the name implies - and our species deserves the credit. I am a devout atheist - nothing else makes any sense to me and I must admit to being bewildered by those, who in the face of what appears so obvious, still believe in a mystical creator. However I can see that the promise of infinite immortality is a more palatable proposition than the absolute certainty of finite mortality which those of us who are subject to free thought (as opposed to free will) have to look forward to and many may not have the strength of character to accept it.

Thus I am a supporter of Amnesty International, a humanist and an atheist. I believe in a secular, democratic society in which women and men have total equality, and individuals can pursue their lives as they wish, free of constraints - religious or otherwise. I feel that the difficult ethical and social problems which invariably arise must be solved, as best they can, by discussion and am opposed to the crude simplistic application of dogmatic rules invented in past millennia and ascribed to a plethora of mystical creators - or the latest invention; a single creator masquerading under a plethora of pseudonyms. Organisations which seek political influence by co-ordinated effort disturb me and thus I believe religious and related pressure groups which operate in this way are acting antidemocratically and should play no part in politics. I also have problems with those who preach racist and related ideologies which seem almost indistinguishable from nationalism, patriotism and religious conviction.”
― Harry Kroto

“A regime that can suspend or abrogate the constitution and run the country on its whims and caprice should be ashamed of bringing on its lips the word "law". It is like prescribing a punishment for adultery after raping the country. It is like saying that Holy Quran is suspended nobody can escape from the Hadees.”
― Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, If I Am Assassinated

“[Taken from a BBC documentary]

Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his communist parents.”
― Tariq Ali

“Gregor flushed as he went on: "The entire content of the Confesions could be put into one single sentence in the book: when Augustine addresses God, saying: 'Thou hast made us for Thyself and our heart is unquiet until it rests in Thee.' This sentence, my lords and friends, is immortal. It contains the very heart of religion.”
― Louis de Wohl The Restless Flame

“I was born with my eyes turned inward.”
― David Joseph Cribbin, Father Crow and Other Poems

“The sanction of force stands behind the medley of personal orders and regulations of Martial Law. The sanction of the people's consent stands behind the hierarchy of laws. In one situation, the population is regimented into acquiescence. In the other, the population voluntarily establishes a contract with Parliament. For this reason, one is called a regime and the other, a government. Martial law rests on the sanction of force and not on the sanction of law.”
― Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, If I Am Assassinated

“Christine did not live, or love, as most people do. She lived boundlessly, as generous as she could be cruel, prepared to give her life at any moment for a worthy cause, but rarely sparing a thought for the many casualties that fell in her wake.”
― Clare Mulley, The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville

“Biographers rue the destruction or loss of letters; they might also curse the husband and wife who never leave each other’s side, and thus perform a kind of epistolary abortion.”
― Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey

“The Greatest” is a bite-your-tongue-book. Ultimately a tragic tale it is also immensely uplifting and easily the best footballer biography I have ever read.”
― Mike Parry

“And I *know* I wrote in the above that I hate biographies and reviews that focus on the psychological, surface detail, especially when they pertain to women writers, because I think it’s really about the cult of the personality, which is essentially problematic, and I think simplistically psychologizing which biographies are so wont to do is really problematic, and dangerous, especially when dealing with complicated women who just by being writers at a certain time and age were labelled as nonconformist, or worse, hysterical or ill or crazy, and I think branding these women as femme fatales is all so often done. And I know in a way I’m contributing to this by posting their bad-ass photos, except hopefully I am humanizing them and thinking of them as complicated selves and intellects AND CELEBRATING THEM AS WRITERS as opposed to straight-up objectifying. One particular review long ago in Poetry that really got my goat was when Brian Phillips used Gertrude Stein’s line about Djuna Barnes having nice ankles as an opener in a review of her poetry, and to my mind it was meant to be entirely dismissive, as of course, Stein was being as well. Stein was many important revolutionary things to literature, but a champion of her fellow women writers she was not. They published my letter, but then let the guy write a reply and scurry to the library and actually read Nightwood, one of my all-time, all-times, and Francis Bacon’s too, there’s another anecdote. And it’s burned in my brain his response, which was as dismissive and bourgeois as the review. I don’t remember the exact wordage, but he concluded by summing up that Djuna Barnes was a minor writer. Well, fuck a duck, as Henry Miller would say. And that is how the canon gets made.”
― Kate Zambreno

“By now, he was also a 'Protestant Atheist', which he remained all his life.”
― John Ellis, Quantum Reflections

“Bethune was a communist and an atheist with a healthy contempt for his evangelical father.”
― Larry Hannant, The Politics of Passion: Norman Bethune's Writing and Art

“May be you find out I could be useful getting people out of camps and prisons in Germany - just before they got shot. I should love to do it and I like to jump out of a plane even every day.”
― Christine Granville

“For a once renowned woman who loved telling tales of dodging bullets, wielding grenades and subverting dogs trained to kill, Christine's story is, surprisingly, little known today.”
― Clare Mulley, The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville

“She could do anything with dynamite, except eat it.”
― Clare Mulley

“I entered Princeton University as a graduate student in 1959, when the Department of Mathematics was housed in the old Fine Hall. This legendary facility was marvellous in stimulating interaction among the graduate students and between the graduate students and the faculty. The faculty offered few formal courses, and essentially none of them were at the beginning graduate level. Instead the students were expected to learn the necessary background material by reading books and papers and by organising seminars among themselves. It was a stimulating environment but not an easy one for a student like me, who had come with only a spotty background. Fortunately I had an excellent group of classmates, and in retrospect I think the "Princeton method" of that period was quite effective.”
― Phillip A. Griffiths

“Bentham was an atheist and in no sense of the word could he be described as a theologian.”
― James E. Crimmins, On Bentham

“Alexander Berkman was a self-declared atheist attempting to lift the stultifying fog of the gods from the mind of humankind.”
― David Burns, The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus

“Other thoughtful year-round gestures to staff included silver picture frames for wedding anniversaries, flowers to ailing spouses, additional checks for medical bills and even a pet dog”
― Estella M. Chung, Living Artfully: At Home with Marjorie Merriweather Post

“Post kept bound books with typed lists of gifts sent and received ... jeweler Harry Winston sent her a box of cheese”
― Estella M. Chung, Living Artfully: At Home with Marjorie Merriweather Post

“Obsessed with Christine to the end, his last statement as he left his cell was, 'to kill is the final possession'. But Muldowney was wrong. He had never possessed Christine; the resistance burning within her was too great.”
― Clare Mulley, The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville

“Philosophically, I am a logical empiricist and materialist, and I am a veteran of over 400 radio and TV interviews and debates. I am a Christ-myth advocate and am pursuing research into how Christianity could have begun without a historical Jesus of Nazareth. I am married with one daughter and three grandchildren.”
― Frank R. Zindler

“Up to four chauffeurs, two secretaries, two personal maids, and a masseur traveled with her to each home”
― Estella M. Chung, Living Artfully: At Home with Marjorie Merriweather Post

“Luggage and guests did not travel together ... in fact, luggage went by a different route, so suitcases could be distributed to guest rooms before they arrived”
― Estella M. Chung, Living Artfully: At Home with Marjorie Merriweather Post