Best 258 quotes in «autobiography quotes» category

Autobiographies are always written as if the author had it all mapped out with perfect foresight, ignoring the risks and uncertainties at that time. This misleads, as much as those beautiful photographs of a past holiday abstract from the heat, the mosquitoes, and the lack of connectivity.

Autobiography, we know, is flawed from the moment the nib of the pen touches the parchment.

Autobiography is a precious broken vase pieced painstakingly together still showing the chips and cracks. It is a broken truth revealing snapshots of a cracked and chipped life pieced pieced painstakingly together.

be always sure you're right, THEN GO AHEAD!

Before, the woods had always done so much for me. Once I could actually go out into the woods and communicate with God, or Nature or something. Now that something didn’t come through. It was just not there anymore. More than ever I began to wonder whether God actually existed. Maybe God changed as the individual changed, or perhaps grew as one grew.

better to keep a good conscience with an empty purse, than to get a bad opinion of myself, with a full one.

Books seem the most potent source: each one is the sum total of a life that can be inhaled in a single day. I read fast, so I'm hoovering up lives at a ferocious pace, six or seven or eight in a week. I particularly love autobiographies: I can eat a whole person by sundown.

Bu öğretmen Linz Realschule'sindeki doktor Leopold Poetsch idi ve bu meziyetleri şahsında toplamıştı. Sert görünüşlğ, fakat içi iyilikle dolu saygıdeğer bir ihtiyardı. Gz kamaştırıcı görünüşü bizi etkiliyor ve peşinden sürüklüyordu. Ders verirken bize içinde bulunduğumuz zamanı unutturan ve bütün sınıfı sihirli bir şekilde geçmişin derinliklerine götürüp, orada yüzyıllarca sislerin altında kalmış birtakım tarihsel olaylara canlı bir gerçeklik kazandıran, bu saçları kırlaşmaya başlamış adamı, bugün bile büyük bir heyecan ile gözlerimin önüne getiririm. Biz öğrenciler, zihinlerimiz açılmış sinirlerimiz gerilmiş, gözlerimizden yaşlar gelecek kadar heyecanlı bir biçimde bu adamın dersini dinlerdik.

But I had already fallen. Fallen into this deep, dark hole. I was trapped. Trapped in this nightmare.

But you can't fault me on my footnotes. I've worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of putting footnotes in chapter 5, the autobiographical chapter, started out simply as a joke. Who but a biblical scholar would think of footnoting an autobiography? But the joke quickly got out of hand and become a significant part of that chapter. I plan someday to write a scholarly article consisting of a single sentence and a twenty-page footnote.

But there was no time to rest on my laurels.

Clearly everyone in my life who should have been vertical was horizontal.

Definition of my alcoholism One was too many and twenty was not enough.

Dialogue in the works of autobiography is quite naturally viewed with some suspicion. How on earth can the writer remember verbatim conversations that happened fifteen, twenty, fifty years ago? But 'Are you playing, Bob?' is one of only four sentences I have ever uttered to any Arsenal player (for the record the others are 'How's the leg, Bob?' to Bob Wilson, recovering from injury the following season; 'Can I have your autograph, please?' to Charlie George, Pat Rice, Alan Ball and Bertie Mee; and, well, 'How's the leg, Brian?' to Brian Marwood outside the Arsenal club shop when I was old enough to know better) and I can therefore vouch for its absolute authenticity.

Eğer bu işe layıkıyla sarılmayıp da işi  ucundan tutarsanız, ancak basit bir geveze ve istismarcı olmaktan ileri gidemezsiniz.

Do you consider yourself a blessing or just another person?

Dylan [Thomas] I knew before and after he became famous. He was splendid, rapacious, demanding as a young man. To much has been written about him for me to add to the legend. As that legend began to grow in his lifetime I learned to separate him from his poetry, to find him in person increasingly tedious and his poems increasingly exciting, both in print and when he was reading them.

Ever met a sympathetic doctor? No ways. They’re always impatient, glancing at the watch, calculating the price of your sickness against the price of another pair of shoes for the bitch wife with the reluctant cunt.

Eventually we discovered Bleeker Bob's in the West Village on 118 West Third Street. One time I was there I literally tried to rip the first Iron Maiden album out of the hands of a friend of mine. [...] I was having a tug-of-war with this guy over who was gonna buy it. [...] If I hadn't won, I would've gone home and gotten my shitty little tape recorder that you have to use two fingers to push play and record on, and I would've brought that to my friend's house and held it in front of a speaker to tape the record so I'd have something to listen to until I could find another copy. Yeah, it'd sound terrible but so what? We didn't know anything else. When I hear people say, 'I hate MP3s, they sound like shit,' I'm like, 'Fuck you, you hae no idea, you first-world-problem-having motherfucker.

Everybody has some secrets he cannot bear to divulge; everybody also has some illusions about himself, which it is almost impossible for him to regard as illusions. However, although it is not possible to write a wholly true autobiography, neither is it possible to write one that contains no truth at all. [How to Read a Book (1972), P. 241]

Everyone has a home but me.

Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing—escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you’ll find a compulsion to flee—a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores. — Teller: A Novel

For days & nights, Phoolan related her extraordinary life via an interpreter. Recorded & transcribed, the typescript ran to 2000 pages. Writer Marie-Therese Cuny & I shaped this into a first draft. Then over several weeks in 1995, and with the aid of translator & journalist Vijay Kranti, Susanna & I read it back to Phoolan page by page. She would interrupt to correct errors, clear confusing contradictions, & add more recollections as they came to her. Phoolan signed her name at the bottom of each page, the only word she knew how to write.

Few people become successful overnight at any endeavor. Most people have learned to stick with whatever it is they wish to achieve and to work step by step until they reach their objective. That has certainly proven true in my life.

Everything bleeds into everything and fiction is just this funny desperate little attempt to staunch the bleeding.

Expensive illogicalities and inefficiencies do not worry the monsters of American bureaucracy, and the taxpayers are enthusiastic and eager to spend fortunes in the name of fighting crime. Prison places cost the US taxpayer more than university places. The American belief that prisons are the best way to combat crime has led to an incarceration rate that is at least five times that of almost any industrialised nation. Overcrowding is endemic. Conditions are appalling, varying from windowless, sensory-deprived isolation to barren futile brutality.

Filming “The Love Boat” was exciting, but sometimes it was hard to keep track of where to show up for work. It all depended on the cut. Some of them were really on the ship. Some were really on the set. Like if they had the stars for a week, that was usually on the set, except if we were on location for that particular show.

I didn't find my story; it found me, as autobiography always does: finds you out in your deepest most private places.

Have you ever really wanted to be able to do something, but you came across a roadblock of some kind? You have a difficult choice. I made that choice once and it changed my whole life, by giving me experiences I never would have had if I took the easy street and had not tried.

He was eight years older than I was, most of the calendar year.

[His research into biblical criticism had lead him to the conclusion that most of what was contained in traditional religion simply wasn't true] Was I to lie in order to teach the truth? ...Was I to repeat these words? It was impossible. It was certain they would stick in my throat. On these grounds the separation was decided by me.

I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages.

I am halfway through Hillary Clinton's latest called "Living History"...pretty lighthearted on the scale...unlike David Hick's autobiography...I had to skip a couple of hundred pages in the middle of that one because it was too distressing for me to read. Undoubtedly yours will be the same...I will read the beginning, skip all the awful bit in the middle and read your happy ever after bit at the end.

I believe that we are who we choose to be. Nobody is going to come and save you. You've got to save yourself. Nobody is going to give you anything. You've got to go out and fight for it. Nobody knows what you want except you, and nobody will be as sorry as you if you don't get it. So don't give up your dreams.

I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul.

I don't need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster.

Former police chief of Houston once said of me: “Frank Abagnale could write a check on toilet paper, drawn on the Confederate States Treasury, sign it ‘U.R. Hooked’ and cash it at any bank in town, using a Hong Kong driver’s license for identification.

Freedom is difficult…but we have never had to put a wall up to keep the people in.

Happy 3rd anniversary Navigating Life's Roadways! This book is a charge and blessing from above. Writing it has been on my radar for a while.

Here’s what I want you to understand. You can’t trust the voice in your head—the one that’s talking to you all the time. It’s more often wrong than right. You can think of this trick as learning to turn the volume way down and eventually turning it off altogether. Then you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

How is it possible to write one's autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?

I am constantly telling my own story to myself, and these days that's about all the narrative flow I can handle.

I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

I don,t just want success for my self ,I want my success to benefit others . Osman Gulum

I don't know which hurt more: his rejection, his punch, or my own elder siblings laughing at my pain.

I feel like a little tug in a great storm. But I'm fastened to a great ship on ahead. It's going into port and can't lose its way.

If I was building any new kind of life to live, it really didn't seem that way. It's not as if I had turned in any old one to live it. If anything, I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library -everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.

If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - than my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.

If I can do it, anybody can do it. Willpower is strong! I believe that. You just have to have faith in yourself—and God—and make sure you know where your priorities stand.

...if it be true that every novel contains an element of autobiography—and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can only express himself in his creation—then there are some of us to whom an open display of sentiment is repugnant.