Biographical Significance Quotes

I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.

But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about.

I think 'Comic Book: The Movie' is the apex of my career in terms of making a personal statement that has significance to me and resonates with biographical detail about not only my career, but all the people that I've worked with in my career. All of it's riddled, on- and off-camera, with people I've known and worked with for decades.

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, monachism of the Hermit Anthony, the Reformation of Luther, Quakerism of Fox, Methodism of Wesley, abolition of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome;" and all history resolves itself easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Let a man, then, know his worth, and keep things under his feet.

I worked with James Orange and Hosea Williams as a teenager, and he's portrayed in the movie by Wendell Pierce. So, for me to be able to come in, 20 years after working with them as a teenager, and to portray Reverend James Orange in 'Selma' is mind-blowing.

How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.

There are human beings who will be helped in understanding our times through the diaries of Edward Robb Ellis.

Let no one think that I do not love the old ministers. They were, probably, the best men in their generation, and they deserve that their biographies should fill the pages of the town histories. If I could but hear the "glad tidings" of which they tell, and which, perchance, they heard, I might write in a worthier strain than this.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place. For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal

Why make a biopic if it's not somehow helping us now? There's really no point. If it's not informing how we can do things differently now and maybe not repeat our mistakes, than why do this piece about this person or this event?

In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.