Petrarch Biography Quotes

If you're alive, kick into drive. Chase whimsies. See if you can turn dreams into a way to make a living, if not an entire way of life. ~ Kevin Smith

GT: You know how you think you know these things about yourself?
GT: Like all these personal attributes about you as if theyre written down somewhere like a sort of mini biography so they have to be true.
GT: So you just believe them and hope that the believing is what makes them true.
GT: But then you spend so much time believing those things and taking their truth for granted that you somehow forget to MAKE them true with your words and deeds.
GT: How can i truly love adventure when i never even knew what it was? ~ Andrew Hussie

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

Isn't that exactly the definition of biography? An artificial logic imposed on an 'incoherent succession of images'? ~ Milan Kundera

Our theology must become biography. ~ Tim Hansel

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

During their subsequent meetings, which were soon and often, Lance confessed and anatomized his passion for her. He even gave her its (the passion's, of course) biography. It had been born of a book jacket, the one responsible for the only really nice thing ever said about Eloise Michaud in a metropolitan review - The photo-portrait on the book jacket will move as many books as, say, good writing might. To be honest, however, the picture is worth quite the price of the volume. Miss Michaud is the most scrumptious scrivener ever to set pen to the paper of a book-club contract. ~ Theodore Sturgeon

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

He lay in bed open-eyed in the dark. There were intestinal moans from his left side, where gas makes a hairpin turn at the splenic flexure. He felt a mass of phlegm wobbling in his throat but he didn't want to get out of bed to expel it, so he swallowed the whole nasty business, a slick syrupy glop. This was the texture of his life. If someone ever writes his true biography, it will be a chronicle of gas pains and skipped heartbeats, grinding teeth and dizzy spells and smothered breath, with detailed descriptions of Bill leaving his desk to walk to the bathroom and spit up mucus, and we see photographs of ellipsoid clots of cells, water, organic slimes, mineral salts and spotty nicotine. Or descriptions just as long and detailed of Bill staying where he is and swallowing. ~ Don DeLillo

If a hundred or a thousand people, all of the same
age, of the same constitution and habits, were suddenly
seized by the same illness, and one half of them were to
place themselves under the care of doctors, such as they
are in our time, whilst the other half entrusted themselves
to Nature and to their own discretion, I have not the
slightest doubt that there would be more cases of death
amongst the former, and more cases of recovery among
the latter. ~ Petrarch

Broad-Based Education:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… It
was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical
application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

- Commencement address, Stanford University,
June 12, 2005 ~ George Beahm

When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote. ~ Jane Campion

But the involuntary tricks of memory and the voluntary ones of imagination make always such terrible havoc of facts that truth, be it ever so much sought and cared for, appears in history and biography only in a more or less disfigured condition. ~ Frederick Niecks

It sometimes happens that the town child is more alive to the fresh beauty of the country than a child who is country born. My brother and I were born in London ... but our descent, our interest and our joy were in the north country'.
Quoted in The Tale of Beatrix Potter a Biography by Margaret Lane, First Edition p 32-33 ~ Beatrix Potter

Elizabeth Rothra's excellent biography of Charles Torrey Simpson restates his philosophies about the intrinsic value of natural ecosystems like the Everglades. No one knew better than he the history of the plants and animals of South Florida or conveyed it with more humor and enthusiasm. ~ Marjory Stoneman Douglas

It is better to will the good than to know the truth, ~ Petrarch

I hold Petrarch at leastly partly responsible for the disconcerting gap between Italian's written and spoken vocabularies. The ~ Dianne Hales

My kin would sooner have a badger in their house than a Campbell."
Alan saw his mother open hermouth and shook his head to silence her. He not only knew Shelby could hold her own but wanted to see her do it.
"Most MacGregors were comfortable enough with badgers in the parlor."
"Barbarians!" Daniel sucked in his breath. "The Campbells were barbarians, each and every one of them."
Shelby tilted her head as if to study him from a new angle. "The MacGregors have a reputation for being sore losers."
Instantly Daniel's face went nearly as red as his hair. "Losers? Hah! There's never been a Campbell born who could stand up to a MacGregor in a fair fight. Backstabbers."
"We'll have Rob Roy's biography again in a minute," Shelby heard Caine mutter. "You don't have a drink, Dad," he said, hoping to distract him. "Shelby?"
"Yes." She shifted her gaze to him, noting he was doing his best to maintain sobriety. "Scotch," she told him, with a quick irrepressible wink. "Straight up.If the MacGregors had been wiser," she continued without missing a beat, "perhaps they wouldn't have lost their land and their kilts and the name.Kings," she went on mildly as Daniel began to huff and puff, "have a habit of getting testy when someone's trying to overthrow them."
"Kings!" Daniel exploded. "An English king, by God! No true Scotsman needed an English king to tell him how to live on his land."
Shelby's lips curved as Caine handed her a glass. "That's a trut ~ Nora Roberts

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

In 1988, William Manchester began writing The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm, the third and final volume of his biography of Winston Churchill. ~ William Manchester

Fake boobs are weird ya'll" read by Patrick Stewart. ~ Amy Poehler

My mother calls it 'the black tax.' Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up from zero. ~ Trevor Noah

Sports biography at its best. Rich in period detail, anecdote, and fresh perspective, Strong Boy paints both the good and the bad sides of success, as America's growing celebrity culture turned a simple Irish American gladiator into a national, in fact international hero. A very human story with profound parallels for our sports-obsessed culture today! ~ Nigel Hamilton

I'm not the person who reading a ppl's biography in order to get a moral lesson. ~ Ryzal Ibrahim

Hitherto your eyes have been darkened and you have looked too much, yes, far too much, upon the things of earth. If these so much delight you what shall be your rapture when you lift your gaze to things eternal! ~ Petrarch

I just want to be really clear about this: Anyone who has read Colin Powell's biography - there's an entire section where he talks about experiencing segregation. Colin Powell did not appear when he became head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's not how it happened. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

What use is there for a biography of myself? I'm just a movie actor. ~ Conrad Veidt

As mankind 'matures,' as it becomes more possible to be frank in the scrutiny of the self and others and in the publication of one's findings, biography and autobiography will take the place of fiction for the investigation and discussion of character. ~ H.G.Wells

I'd prefer people read about Churchill and how he wasn't overwhelmed by Nazi Germany. Amazing; that the morale of a country rested on one person's shoulders. Extraordinary people carried that country through its darkest hours; truly inspirational. I suppose that's my theme. Whether it's a biography or a movie; whether it's fictional or true, I'm inspired by people doing great things. ~ Larry Ellison

A damnably readable, streamlined, yet deeply researched work. Skipping the ancestors and aftermath of conventional biography, Max gives us the man, his work, and his times-the niceties of which (so complicated, so exquisitely intertwined) Max articulates with, well, Wallace-like lucidity and wit. Above all this is the story of a touching young man who insisted on being something better than simply the smartest person in the room. ~ Blake Bailey

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink. ~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

It's time for male leaders to not only ask for binders of qualified women, but to re-write the definition of 'qualified.' The best man for the job, may in fact, be a woman, whose biography is not traditional, but is rich with experiences and skills that are not necessarily learned either in school or on the job. ~ Madeleine M. Kunin

Who over-refines his argument brings himself to grief ~ Petrarch

I'm not a very good writer. But I'm a HELLUVA re-writer. ~ Laini Giles

I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be. ~ Edmund White

She appeared to him more beautiful than he had ever seen her yet. Beautiful with a beauty which was wholly feminine and angelic, with a complete beauty which would have made Petrarch sing and Dante kneel. [...] ~ Victor Hugo, Les Misérables.

I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era. ~ Barbara Taylor Bradford

Char Miller's lively, insightful account of the life and world of American forester Gifford Pinchot fills a vitally important gap in environmental and conservation history. Anyone captivated by the issues and controversies surrounding the preservation and development of the nation's natural heritage should read this engaging, carefully researched biography. ~ Carolyn Merchant

She will speculate that she didn't fully know her husband - this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband "alive" in her memory - elusive, teasing. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

While life is in your body, you have the rein of all thoughts in your hands. ~ Petrarch

There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die. ~ Fay Weldon

History is neither more nor less than biography on a large scale. ~ Alphonse De Lamartine

I have been devoured all my life by an incurable and burning impatience: and to this day find all oratory, biography, operas, films, plays, books, and persons, too long. ~ Margot Asquith

It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed - to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis! ~ Joyce Carol Oates

This is a glorious biography ... The time is ripe for a new biography of Edith Wharton of this intimacy and on this scale ... Lee the biographer pursues her subject down every winding corridor, into every hidden passage and dark corner ... Her critical exploration of Edith Whartons work is dazzlingly assured ... A feat of exhaustive research, and finely tuned to Whartons creative achievement at the same time ... [Wharton] could scarcely have failed to be impressed by ... its artistic sympathy, its sonorous depths, and its soaring conception. ~ Mark Bostridge

Virtually every literary piece written about Adolf Hitler in more than half a century since 1945 has been based on antipathy.
-- Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 11 ~ Russel H.S. Stolfi

Tolkien came to regard the tale of Beren and Tinuviel as 'the first example of the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, "the wheels of the world", are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak'. Such a worldview is inherent in the fairy-tale (and Christian) idea of the happy ending in which the dispossessed are restored to joy; but perhaps Tolkien was also struck by the way it had been borne out in the Great War, when ordinary people stepped out of ordinary lives to carry the fate of nations. ~ John Garth