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A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one. (Acton Harold)
History is the essence of innumerable biographies. (Acton Harold)
If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear. (Acton Harold)
No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself. (Acton Harold)
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory. (Acton Harold)
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. (Acton Harold)
There is properly no history; only biography. (Acton Harold)
Biography is history seen through the prism of a person. (Acton Harold)
Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified. (Acton Harold)
The surrounding that householders crave are glorified autobiographies. (Acton Harold)
Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium. (Acton Harold)
An autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers. (Acton Harold)
I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I. -men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering. (Acton Harold)
If the reviewing of books be... an ungentle craft, the making of them is, for the most part, a dishonest one -- and that department of literature which ought to be entrusted to those only who are distinguished for their moral qualities is, not infrequently, in the hands of authors totally devoid of good taste, good feeling, and generous sentiment. The writers of Lives have, in our time, assumed a license not enjoyed by their more scrupulous predecessors -- for they interweave the adventures of the living with the memoirs of the dead; and, pretending to portray the peculiarities which sometimes mark the man of genius, they invade the privacy and disturb the peace of his surviving associates. (Acton Harold)
A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle. (Acton Harold)
Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler. (Acton Harold)
Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him. (Acton Harold)
Anyone who profits from the experience of others probably writes biographies. (Acton Harold)
On the trail of another man, the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn; any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it. (Acton Harold)
A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem. (Acton Harold)
Memoirs are the backstairs of history. (Acton Harold)
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