#biography

Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age. ↗

— Roberto Bolaño

#memoir #age

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#opening-lines #life

... Whereas Hunt recommended universal charity, Keats, feeling himself 'in a Mist', relied on a knowing passivity: 'Men should bear with each other - there lives not the Man who may not be cut up, aye hashed to pieces on his weakest side'. ↗

— Nicholas Roe

#compassion #keats #leigh-hunt #life

There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mankind there is nothing at all. ↗

— Benjamin Moser

#punishment #war #biography

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#expectations #open-mindedness #preconceptions #reading #biography

Chasing angels or fleeing demons, go to the mountains. ↗

— Jeffrey Rasley

#expeditions #himalayas #memoir #mountaineering #mountains

You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture. You've got to become them." (Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History) ↗

— David McCullough

#history #biography

I turned to books for comfort. (Former First Lady, Laura Bush) ↗

— Laura Bush

#political #politically-correct #telling #biography

All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. ↗

— Anne Brontë

#thought #truth #writing #biography

بلدٌ يقضي فيه المرء أوقاته متطلّعاً إلى السماء متأمّلا القمم الشاهقة ، هو بلدٌ لي ↗

— Amélie Nothomb

#mountains #novel #biography