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Biography Quotes

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Biography Quotes

“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.”

MurderPossessionResistanceObsessionWwiiBiographySecond World WarSpiesKrystyna SkarbekChristine GranvilleSpecial Agents
Book:The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville
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“The “facts” about Ali’s life are few, and come from Wallace’s writing. Wallace was a careful writer, but he naturally wrote through his own perceptions, memories, and filters.”

InspirationalAwarenessInsightFearlessFascinationBiographyExploreReflectiveRawEncourageing
Book:"Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion
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“Pong had mutated into large stand-up Sega consoles by '82 and here was some extra revenue the guys were well up for. So the space on the left of the entrance was to be the games room. Until two weeks to opening. "Where's the cloakroom?" "The what?" "The cloakroom, the fucking cloakroom." "What's your problem?" "We don't have a cloakroom. We have special polished South African granite bar tops that we haven't told Erasmus about 'cause he has a thing about apartheid, we have a balcony balustrade made of shaped QE-fucking-2 mahogany, but we seem to have built an entire club without a cloakroom." "Fuck." Hence you did not pass the games room but the cloakroom, the only cloakroom in the Manchester with forty-two power points. if you ever wanted to do a bit of ironing, these people were there for you.”

MusicBiography
Book:24 Hour Party People: What the Sleeve Notes Never Tell You
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“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?”

MusicBiography
Book:24 Hour Party People: What the Sleeve Notes Never Tell You
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“I had now also got to deal with the fate of my horses and my dogs... In the end I decided to give them to my friends. I rode in to Nairobi on my favourite horse, Rouge, going very slowly and looking round to the North, and the South. It was a very strange thing to Rouge, I thought, to be going in by the Nairobi road, and not to be coming back. I installed him, with some trouble, in the horse-van of the Naivasha train, I stood in the van and felt, for the last time, his silky muzzle against my hands and my face. I will not let thee go, Rouge, except thou bless me. We had found together the riding-path down to the river amongst the Native shambas and huts, on the steep slippery descent he had walked as nimbly as a mule, and in the brown running river-water I had seen my own head and his close together. May you now, in a valley of clouds, eat carnations to the right and stock to the left.”

AnimalsPartingBiographyHorsesMemoirsFarewells
Book:Out of Africa
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“Even as individuals become families and families become communities, and communities become nations, so eventually must the nations draw together in peace.”

HumanityNationsPeaceInternational RelationsBiographyMothers And DaughtersIndividualsCommunitiesC A Dawson ScottLiterary AssociationsMrs SapphoPen American CenterPen International
Book:Mrs Sappho: The Life of C.A. Dawson Scott, Mother of International P.E.N.
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“But this day he was lost in the story he made of their bodies. The men were in the midst of saving a six-inch Mickey Mouse trapped in a prison made of black VHS tapes. ...Before he could make out his mother's face, the backhand blasted the side of his head, followed by another, then more. A rain of it. A storm of mother. The boy's grandmother, hearing the screams, rushed in and, as if by instinct, knelt on all fours over the boy, make a small and feeble house with her frame. Inside it, the boy curled into his clothes and waited for his mother to calm. Through his grandmother's trembling arms, he noticed the videocassettes had toppled over. Mickey Mouse was free.”

ChildhoodMotherhoodNostalgiaMemoirBiography
Book:On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
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“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.”

SacrificeCrueltyWwiiBiographySecond World WarSpiesSoeSpecial AgentKrystyna SkarbekChristine Granville
Book:The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville
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“We know quite a bit about Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the great figures of modern science. But we know relatively little about Ali, Wallace’s faithful companion who supported him during much of his eight-year sojourn in the Malay Archipelago in the mid-19th century.”

HistoryHumourMemoirImaginativeNatural WorldBiographyExploreExplorerSpeculative
Book:"Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion
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“Sometimes when a person is not being heard, it is appropriate to blame him or her. Perhaps he or she is speaking obscurely; perhaps he is claiming too much; perhaps she is speaking rather too personally. And one can, perhaps, charge Spielrein on all three counts. But, on balance, her inability to win recognition for her insight into repression was not her fault; it was Freud’s and Jung’s. Preoccupied with their own theories, and with each other, the two men simply did not pause even to take in the ideas of this junior colleague let alone to lend a helping hand in finding a more felicitous expression for her thought. More ominously still, both men privately justified their disregard by implicitly casting her once more into the role of patient, as though that role somehow precluded a person from having a voice or a vision of his or her own. It was and remains a damning comment on how psychoanalysis was evolving that so unfair a rhetorical maneuver, one so at odds with the essential genius of the new therapeutic method, came so easily to hand. In the great race between Freud and Jung to systematize psychoanalytic theory, to codify it once and for all, a simpler truth was lost sight of: Sometimes a person is not heard because she is not listened to.”

PsychologyBiography
Book:A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud & Sabina Spielrein
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“I remember one time as a young child playing with friends. Fantasizing, we each sketched our ideal “dream home.” Everyone else drew intricate mansions, complete with elaborate swimming pools and multi-car garages. I sketched the floor plan of a small square house, with four identically-sized square rooms: a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen/dining room, and a bathroom/laundry room. A place to sleep, a place to be, a place to eat, and a place to.. uh.. excrete. It was everything I needed. Nothing more, nothing less. They thought I was weird. I thought their mansions were full of lots of bullshit.”

LifeChildhoodMaterialismBiographyMinimalism
Author:Luigi Mangione
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