Famous Quotes & Sayings

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening.

Noel Riley Fitch

Whether in print or other media, a good biography is more than a court record or a stringing together of already familiar sources. It breathes life into the subject.

Joseph Campbell

Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or place. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history, mythology is absurd.

Will Rogers

There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs.

A. S. Byatt

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

Denis O'Hare

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.

David A. Adler

My first biography was 'Our Golda: The Life of Golda Meir.' To research that book, I bought a 1905 set of encyclopedias. Those books told me what each of the places Golda Meir lived in were like when she lived there.

Dan Wakefield

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.

Brad Grey

Mental illnesses involve biological brain disorders, no matter what Tom Cruise says,

Alan Jackson

I didn't realize until I was older what a huge music fan my daddy really was, and actually that my grandma played banjo at one time, and I didn't even know that until a year or two ago.

Al Sharpton

If Charlton Heston can have a constitutional right carry a rifle, why can't grandma have a constitutional right to health care?

Chris Colfer

To Grandma: Once upon a time, there was a boy who flew.

Chris Colfer

To Grandma, for being my first editor and giving me the best writing advice I’ve ever received: “Christopher, I think you should wait until you’re done with elementary school before worrying about being a failed writer.

Chris Bohjalian

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.

Bryan Sykes

By looking at the details of the DNA, it is possible to chart the flow of your ancestry from your ultimate grandmother to more modern times.

Caroline Kennedy

I feel like my grandparents and parents gave me a tremendous amount. And if I can pass some of that on, then I'll be very happy.

Camille Paglia

Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism . My grandmother was sill scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard !

John Page

We've already done our investigation and presented it to the grand jury,

Charles Caleb Colton

Great men, like comets, are eccentric in their courses, and formed to do extensive good by modes unintelligible to vulgar minds.

Charles Caleb Colton

Great minds had rather deserve contemporaneous applause without obtaining it, than obtain without deserving it. If it follow them it is well, but they will not deviate to follow it.

Charles Caleb Colton

In life we shall find many men that are great, and some that are good, but very few men that are both great and good.

Charles Caleb Colton

Speaking generally, no man appears great to his contemporaries, for the same reason that no man is great to his servants--both know too much of him.

Charles Dickens

The secret was such an old one now, had so grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it away.

Charles Dickens

So new to him," she muttered, "so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!...

Charles Dickens

But, in this separation I associate you only with the good and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you have done far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may.

Charles Dickens

Let me feel now what sharp distress I may.

Charles Simmons

True greatness consists in being great in little things.

Charles Dickens

At the great iron gate of the churchyard he stopped and looked in. He looked up at the high tower spectrally resisting the wind, and he looked round at the white tombstones, like enough to the dead in their winding-sheets, and he counted the nine tolls of the clock-bell.

Charles Dickens

The cold hoarfrost glistened on the tombstones, and sparkled like rows of gems, among the stone carvings of the old church. The snow lay hard and crisp upon the ground; and spread over the thickly-strewn mounds of earth, so white and smooth a cover, that it seemed as if corpses lay there, hidden only by their winding sheets.

Charles Spurgeon

No one served God by doing things tomorrow.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

If we make provision for sinning tomorrow, we will be sinning tomorrow.

David Brenner

I want my tombstone to read: If this is a joke, I don't get it.

Earl Weaver

On my tombstone just write, 'The sorest loser that ever lived.'

Eliza Coupe

I cannot feel my legs from the waist down any longer. But who cares? I look good and that's all that matters. And when I die of hypothermia for wearing formal shorts in winter, tell them to put that on my tombstone.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Earth has scarcely an acre that does not remind us of actions that have long preceded our own, and its clustering tombstones loom up like reefs of the eternal shore, to show us where so many human barks have struck and gone down.

Agnes de Mille

I want one word on my tombstone - dancer.