Biographer Quotes

“In the beginning, God created the heaven the earth and sometime later, the vampire.”
― Eli Wilde, My Unbeating Heart

“She was within me like the blood was within me in each and every fibre. I talked to her, but she never spoke back. It was just like talking to God, I never knew what either one of them thought about the words I spoke. It did not make her unreal. It did not make God unreal. It just made me want to connect with them even more.”
― Eli Wilde, My Unbeating Heart

“He had a tongue like a razor, let us start with that. Now when you take that, and add to it eyes like a hawk, and ears like a bat, you’ve got yourself a second-to-none biographer. But add to all of that an imagination—trouble is what you’ve got then.”
― Jean-Luke Swanepoel, The Thing About Alice

“Most biographies and autobiographies are each merely a slightly different packaging of the well-known fact that success rarely comes quickly or easily.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“This is long and I will stop. But mostly, I am sad at the ways misogyny is embedded in the literary landscape like the roots of a tree, extending everywhere invisibly below the surface and too often breaking through.”
― Ruth Franklin

“In his book Footsteps (1985), Richard Holmes compared the biographer's act to 'a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past'. What Holmes realized in the course of his own pursuits was that the footstepping biographer never actually reached his subject; only encountered at best the second-order suggestions of their earlier presence: glimpses of afterglow, retinal ghosts, psychic gossamer. 'You would never catch them,' cautioned Holmes, 'no, you would never quite catch them...”
― Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot