#biography

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history. ↗

— Robert Hall

#biography #composed #composition #concentrated #delightful

Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#fictions #life #lived #memories #life

Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing—escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you’ll find a compulsion to flee—a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores. — Teller: A Novel ↗

— Frederick Weisel

#escape #frederick-weisel #teller #weisel #life

YOU AND YOU ALONE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN HAPPINESS, NOT ANYONE ELSE ↗

— Sondra A. Torres

#autobiography #family #fetal-alcohol-syndrome #inspirational #family

Always live your life with your biography in mind," Dad was fond of saying. "Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly. ↗

— Marisha Pessl

#life #life

There began to appear before my romantic eyes...a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape. ↗

— Erik Larson

#germany #history #hitler #war #world-war-ii

I thought of the one thing about home that I missed, my dad's study with its built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves sagging with thick biographies and the black leather chair that kept me just uncomfortable enough to keep from feeling sleepy as I read. ↗

— John Green

#books #read #study #uncomfortable #biography

I'm not Mickey Mouse, I'm a human being. ↗

— Mitch Winehouse

#biography #biography

History is the essence of innumerable biographies. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#genealogy #history #people #biography

The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in our real lives, we know very little about our parents as they were before our birth; we have only fragmentary knowledge of the people close to us: we see them come and go and scarcely have they vanished than their place is taken over by others: they form a long line of replaceable beings. Only the novel separates out an individual, trains a light on his biography, his ideas, his feelings, makes him irreplaceable: makes him the center of everything. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#individuality #knowledge #the-novel #biography