Biography Quotes

Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can’t confront it.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray—here? Is it possible that he won’t be coming home with me in another day or two, as we’d planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It’s like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely—perhaps never—furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you’ve ruined both our lives.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

How exhausted I am suddenly!—though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling—almost—exhilarated.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Lastly, Spurgeon reminds us that piety and devotion to Christ are not preferable alternatives to controversy, but rather that they should - when circumstances demand it - lead to the latter. He was careful to maintain that order. The minister who makes controversy his starting point will soon have a blighted ministry and spirituality will wither away. But controversy which is entered into out of love for God and reverence for His Name, will wrap a man's spirit in peace and joy even when he is fighting in the thickest of battle. The piety which Spurgeon admired was not that of a cloistered pacifism but the spirit of men like William Tyndale and Samuel Rutherford who, while contending for Christ, could rise heavenwards, jeopardizing 'their lives unto the death in the high places of the field'. At the height of his controversies Spurgeon preached some of the most fragrant of all his sermons.

~ Iain H. Murray

I do not think my life would make a very interesting book,' I say. 'I feel I can speak with a certain amount of authority here.

~ Paul Murray

But I was eventually okay. And you will be okay too. Here's why. I had already made a decision early on that I would be a plain girl with tons of personality, and accepting it made everything a lot easier. If you are lucky, there is a moment in your life when you have some say as to what your currency is going to be. I decided early on it was not going to be my looks.

~ Amy Poehler

It is the most horrific thought—my husband died among strangers.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Emotions are like passing storms, and you have to remind yourself that it won't rain forever.

~ Amy Poehler

The great biographers take excessive liberties in denigrating his person, and, in doing so, they make it difficult to comprehend

~ Russel H.s. Stolfi

As concerns the question of the psychological engine that drove Hitler, the conventional interpretation of lusting after power is, in final analysis, the refuge of lack of comprehen

~ Russel H.s. Stolfi

The intellectually-inclined biographers stray from the point that the message is directed through the spoken word at the broad masses and not writing to an inbred, self-adoring intellectual e

~ Russel H.s. Stolfi

Although characterized as uncultured and unread, Hitler comes off in his demands to create a monumental signature for a Greater Germany as historically and artistically gi

~ Russel H.s. Stolfi

To comprehend the Hitler of 1919 is to comprehend the Hitler of the entire period from 1919 through

~ Russel H.s. Stolfi

(...)it seems more probable that his anti-Semitism was less emotional and more objective than has been assumed to the pre

~ Russel H.s. Stolfi

Hitler took the action of pitiless massacre as a last resort in the face of a perceived irreconcilable e

~ Russel H.s. Stolfi

Politics for Hitler must be seen as a distant, prophetic vision to be fulfilled and not as an exercise in personal power. There was no political theory for Hitler and no necessity for adherence to any political programs. There was only tactical political flexibility in the service of seizure of power and the establishment of a Greater Germany in Eu

~ Russel H.s. Stolfi

And in contrast to the Communist revolution in Russia and the Communist attempts at revolution in Germany from 1918 through 1923, Hitler's were virtually blood

~ Russel H.s. Stolfi

Hitler derived several things from his experience and achievements in World War I, without which his rise to power in 1933 would have been at the least problematical, and at the most inconceivable. Hitler survived the war as a combat soldier—a rifle carrier—in a frontline infantry regiment. The achievement was an extraordinary one based on some combination of near-miraculous luck and combat skill. The interpretive fussing over whether or not Hitler was a combat soldier because he spent most of the war in the part of the regiment described as regimental headquarters can be laid to rest as follows: Any soldier in an infantry regiment on an active front in the west in World War I must be considered to have been a combat soldier. Hitler’s authorized regimental weapon was the Mauser boltaction, magazine-fed rifle. This gives a basic idea of what Hitler could be called upon to do in his assignment at the front. As a regimental runner, he carried messages to the battalions and line companies of the regiment, and the more important ones had to be delivered under outrageously dangerous circumstances involving movement through artillery fire and, particularly later in the war, poison gas and the omnipresent rifle fire of the skilled British sniper detach

~ Russel H.s. Stolfi

In the well reported Kubizek period from late 1904 through mid-1908, with its additiona data from the circumstances of failure at school, lung ailment, and tragic episode of his mother’s death, the picture remains the same. Hitler’s character is one of bold license for a youngster, but not directed toward dissolute behavior or activity that gives a hint of evil. Hitler devoured grand opera and classical music, painted, sketched, planned a great new Linz; he wrote sonnets, communed with nature, and exuded politeness and reserve. These are activities and qualities that suggest potential, although overblown, aspirations to artistic genius. What we see, like it or not, is morally laudable behavior and aspiration on the part of a young man in his teens. But is there a dark side somewhere in this picture?If there were a dark side, it probably would have been the light gray of the contempt that he had for many of his school teachers and his resistance to formal education. Hitler’s comments in Mein Kampf support such contempt and are buoyed by his indelible comment, about his tour of the customs office where his father worked, that the clerks and officials squatted about as monkeys in

~ Russel H.s. Stolfi

In his thoughtful and complex style of analysis, Hitler continued on to note the following: “Since the newspapers in question did not enjoy an outstanding reputation ... I regarded them more as the products of anger and envy than the [representation] of a principled, though perhaps mistaken, point of view.” In the lines above, we see Hitler begin to wrestle with anti- Semitism, flatly reject religious anti-Semitism as unworthy of Austrian cultural tradition, and suspect that the arguments of the anti-Semitic press and gutter pamphlets were exaggerated beyond credibility by too much subjective and too little objective and principled argument. The view of virtually every Hitler biographer that he based his anti-Semitism on arguments derived from the gutter press and pamphlets of Vienna does not hold up in the face of the words above. To the contrary, we see Hitler take the measure of that liter

~ Russel H.s. Stolfi

I dreamed of going to the top of Mount Elum like Alexander the Great to touch Jupiter and even beyond the valley. But, as I watched my brother running across the roof, flying their kites and skillfully flicking the strings back and forth to cut each other's down, I wondered hoe free a daughter could ever be.

~ Malala Yousafzai

Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad—I could not bear to “outlive” them—for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

Writing a biography is a delicate—not a reckless—process, where the end result, if done properly, is simply the truth revealed. This delicate and intricate research process has never before been done for Bob Crane, a man with a story worth telling.

~ Carol M. Ford

He laughed a lot, but as a boy he had been so self-conscious about being dark-skinned that he went to the fields to get buffalo milk to spread on his face, thinking it would make him lighter. It was only when he met my mother that he became comfortable in his own skin. Being loved by such a beautiful girl gave him confidence.

~ Malala Yousafzai

It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers—their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges—But he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight—

~ Joyce Carol Oates

I wish you believe, not for myprofit, but for yours. I daily pray the true God give you light, that you may believe. Whether you will ever believe in tis world I do not know, but when you die I know you will believe what I now say. You will then appear before God you now deny. - Adorinam Judson to his Burman teacher.

~ Courtney Anderson

In America, they make a lot of fuss over little things.

~ Khushwant Singh

The Book Highlights and Attacks areas of Inefficiency and Hypocrisy in Government Offices. It injects the much-need Enema into its Highly Constipated System.

~ Mahesh Ubhayakar

A Book for the Service Minded as well as the Government Bashers, on How to Be and How Not to Be.

~ Mahesh Ubhayakar