Emeagwali Biography Quotes

It's important to begin a biography or any book or story with something to draw the reader in. ~ David A. Adler

Jobs had always been an extremely opinionated eater, with a tendency to instantly judge any food as either fantastic or terrible. He could taste two avocados that most mortals would find indistinguishable, and declare that one was the best avocado ever grown and the other inedible. ~ Walter Isaacson

It is one of the many merits of this admirable biography of Proust's mother that it invites one to return to the novel with perhaps a fuller understanding of Proust's heredity, hinterland, and upbringing ... This fascinating book is full of interesting social and cultural observation, of information about French Jewish life, the position of Jews in society and, of course, the Dreyfus case. But it is essentially a study of one of the most remarkable and fruitful of mother-son relationships. As such it is a book that every Proustian will want to read. ~ Allan Massie

I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for 'The Nation' in the '60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term 'Christian,' it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice. ~ Dan Wakefield

Civically engaged, business oriented, technology obsessed, and socially skilled, Franklin was "our founding Yuppie," declares the New York Times columnist David Brooks. Franklin "would have felt right at home in the information revolution," Walter Isaacson writes in his biography of the statesman. "We can easily imagine having a beer with him after work, showing him how to use the latest digital device, sharing the business plan of a new venture, and discussing the most recent political scandals or policy ideas." The essence of Franklin's appeal is that he was brilliant but practical, interested in everything, but especially in how things work. ~ Fareed Zakaria

History - a biography of a few stout and earnest persons ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person. ~ Louis Fischer

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men. ~ Virginia Woolf

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

I went on a Buddha jag. I read 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist' by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha, which is a great book. ~ Denis O'Hare

Someone calls biography the home aspect of history. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Siamese twins are interesting because they are the only people who can write a biography and an autobiography at the same time. ~ Demetri Martin

If all history is only an amplification of biography, the history of science may be most instructively read in the life and work of the men by whom the realms of Nature have been successively won. ~ Archibald Geikie

Always do what you're afraid to do-Robert F. Kennedy ~ Evan Thomas

When will the human race choose wisely? All know it is just as eventful, if not more so, when the young seek adventure, purpose, and dreams; instead of blaming everyone but themselves if they choose otherwise ~ Theresa Sjoquist

Honouring the youth of their town they provided a décor that a £20-a-Martini fleecing parlour could not have amortized. They had bought eighty low Alvar Aalto stools for the alcove and coctail bar seating. Also, twenty tall numbers in the same bent bleach wood classic style. Extremely expensive and brought in from Finland at equally great expense.

And in the first twelve months, ninety percent had disappeared. Compared to the catastrophic damage done every other week to one of the toilets just off the main dance floor --the level of masonry demolition going deep into the floor implied the use of a full-sized pneumatic drill-- the loss of a bunch of stools was incidental.

The fact that thirty-two then turned up in New Order's rehearsal room was therefore coincidental. If you couldn't join in the public in stealing from your own club, what was the point of opening it? ~ Tony Wilson

The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it. ~ C.S. Lewis

My mother neither encouraged the reading of science fiction nor did she disparage it. She told me later that there was a scheme of things. Young people were first drawn to fiction, but as they grew older they were pulled more and more into nonfiction and biography, because nonfiction is so much more tragic, engrossing, and hilarious than anything else that could be invented. In this grand scheme, comic books and science fiction were just fine. They filled the need for a certain amount of time, and you moved on when that need was no longer filled. ~ Don Borchert

Our lives sometimes depend on computers performing as predicted. ~ Philip Emeagwali

The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Later in life the force of abstinence was to really be understood and my parent's problems became very clear. When will man appreciate his pleasures and respect them enough to indulge in moderation? ~ Theresa Sjoquist

If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud's interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult relationships. He had always treated poems as a form of private communication. He gave his songs to chansonniers, his satires to satirists. Without a constant companion, he was writing in a void. ~ Graham Robb

Sketches Einstein: His Life and Universe A Benjamin Franklin Reader Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Kissinger: A Biography The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (with Evan Thomas) ~ Walter Isaacson

[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

Alas, it is just a single image - an extended moment perhaps. Unlike a biography, a portrait cannot present the many differing moments that make up a personality. ~ Burton Silverman

The hardship of living in a refugee camp made me psychologically strong. ~ Philip Emeagwali

Chacko had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was permitted excesses and eccentricities nobody else was. He claimed to be writing a Family Biography that the Family would have to pay him not to publish. Ammu said that there was only one person in the family who was a fit candidate for biographical blackmail and that was Chacko himself. ~ Arundhati Roy

People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels. ~ Claire Tomalin

I would spend my life on the road logging hundreds of thousands of miles and my story was always the same. . . man comes to town, detonates; man leaves town and drives off into the evening; fade to black. Just the way I like it. ~ Bruce Springsteen

They filled her with the most astonishing sensation of synthesis-as though all the most disparate elements of her biography were at last knitting together. All the things that she had ever known or loved in the world were stitching themselves up and becoming one thing. Realizing this made her feel both unburdened and triumphant. She had that feeling again
of being most spectacularly alive. Not merely alive but outfitted with a mind that was functioning at the uppermost limits of its capacity
a mind that was seeing everything, and understanding everything, as though watching it all from the highest imaginable ridge. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.' ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

What drove us crazy wasn't necessarily the sexual freedom his critic claimed he was unleashing, but freedom, period. Freedom to be yourself, to express yourself, to wear what you wanted to wear, to look the way you wanted to look, to have your own style, your own talk. ~ Larry Geller, Joel Spector, Patricia Romanowski

Dreadful is a poignant biography of a forgotten man who drank himself to death. It's a brilliant evocation of a self-hating gay novelist in the 1940s whom Gore Vidal once considered a rival. ~ Edmund White

I am Orafoura, but you can call me Jarod Kintz. I'm fairly proud to proclaim that Dora J. Arod has me on her short list of "World's worst writers." The list couldn't get any shorter, because I'm the only name on it. I should tell her to stop calling it a list, and change the title to "World's worst writer." If you're wondering why I rate all my work one star, it's because the rating system doesn't have a zero star option, or better yet, go into negative numbers. ~ Orafoura

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

Is what makes you solid a part of you? If the answer is yes, then you are a child of the big bang and a descendant of explosions, collisions, catastrophes, stars, and galaxies.
The protons in your hand have been through every slam, every bash, every disaster, and every creative crash this cosmos has ever managed to throw their way. [...] The story of those cosmic calamities and material miracles is your biography. The story of the universe - from protons and suns to curiosity - is your history. ~ Howard Bloom

I was reading William Shawcross's biography of the Queen Mother, dressed in my witch outfit! And you know what? It was a really good mix; it was a therapeutic mix. ~ Helena Bonham Carter

If it be good to come under the love of God once, surely it is good to keep ourselves there. And yet how reluctant we are! ~ Andrew Bonar

There are things in our lives that take up an enormous importance and that become very dominant effects in our biography. And that comes out of a variety of reasons, but fundamentally comes out of how that particular experience connects with your effective systems of response. ~ Antonio Damasio

Your biography is not your destiny, your decisions are. ~ Tony Robbins

Writing a biography is not a love affair. It's not a marriage. It's a job, it's a piece of work. ~ Hermione Lee

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

Nor do I like being told upsetting news - unless there is a good reason. I can't help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I never did write a biography, and I don't exactly know how to set about it; you see I have to be accurate and keep to the facts, a most difficult thing for a writer of fiction. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

Each of us needs an adequate biography: How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story? ~ James Hillman

I have never tried, in even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for it either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game
the masses. - Mark Twain, a Biography ~ Mark Twain