Best 258 quotes in «autobiography quotes» category

When I bought out my first autobiography I received the biggest tax bill of my life.

9/11/01 Gina: Especially today, with the enormity of current events, I want to convey to you again, how much you mean to me and how proud I am to be your husband. The hard work that you are engaged in right now is exhausting, invisible and largely thankless in the short term. But honey, please know that buried at the core of this tedium is the most noble and important work in the world- God's work; the fruits of which you and I will be lucky enough to enjoy as we grow old together. Watching these little guys grow into men is a privilege that I am proud to share with you, and the perfect fulfillment of our marriage bonds. You are a great mom. You are a great wife. You are my best friend. You are very pretty. Happy Birthday. -Matt

A ball feels different off every player's racket-there are minute but concrete subtleties of force and spin. Now, hitting with her (Steffi Graf), I feel her subtleties. It's like touching her, though we're forty feet apart. Every forehand is foreplay.

All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.

An Autobiography is the truest of all books,for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell (though I didn't use that figure)--the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.

With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged.

A belief which is based on force of habit is one of the saddest and most harmful phenomena of our time－as in the shade of a stone wall everything new grows slowly, becoming stunted, lacking the sap of life. There were too few rays of love in that faith, too many insults, too much animosity and too much envy, which always goes hand in hand with hate. And the light emanating from that faith was nothing but the phosphorescent glow of putrefaction.

Advice is autobiography.

After a short time I felt my truck began to move. The force of the water and the rising floodwaters lifted me and my truck off the road and through an orchard, bumping into trees, flood debris and who knows what else.

a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and, with tea, welcomes the morning.

... A man's wife can hold him devilish uneasy, if she begins to scold and fret, and perplex him, at a time when he has a full load for a railroad car on his mind already.

..And songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.

and I realized that real nobility is in the soul, not in a name.

And I came to recognize that, no matter how difficult the reality, you mustn't let yourself be beaten. You must have a strong will. You have to summon what you know is right from your innermost depths and follow it.

Anyone with an autobiography is almost definitely an evil piece of shit.

Aren’t autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don’t we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am.

As well as writing, 2004 saw my first attempt at wine making: the elixir of life. Unfortunately, my effort tasted more like the elixir of death.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

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!

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

Archie Henderson has won no awards, written no books and never played any representative sport. He was an under-11 tournament-winning tennis player as a boy, but left the game when he discovered rugby where he was one of the worst flyhalves he can remember. This did not prevent him from having opinions on most things in sport. His moment of glory came in 1970 when he predicted—correctly as it turned out—that Griquas would beat the Blue Bulls (then still the meekly named Noord-Transvaal) in the Currie Cup final. It is something for which he has never been forgiven by the powers-that-be at Loftus. Archie has played cricket in South Africa and India and gave the bowling term military medium a new and more pacifist interpretation. His greatest ambition was to score a century on Llandudno beach before the tide came in.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Do you consider yourself a blessing or just another person?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.