Contact
Privacy
Book: Biography: A Very Short Introduction
Quotes of Book: Biography: A Very Short
TOP TAGS :ozymandiasconceptionlarkbeginseparatenessconspiracyhappiness-lifeslow-down

  1. Hermione Lee _ Biography: A Very Short

    Biographers are not usually as explicit as philosophers such as Plato, Wittgenstein, Austin, or Moore on questions of the existence of an essential self, the extent to which a life can be lived according to a philosophical system, or the relation between acts and emotions. That is not their job – unless they are writing the Life of a philosopher. But biography is bound to reflect changing and conflicting concepts about
    book-quote

  2. Hermione Lee _ Biography: A Very Short

    The belief in a definable, consistent self, an identity that develops through the course of a life-story and that can be conclusively described, breaks down, to a great extent, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at a time when psychoanalysis, scientific discoveries such as the theory of relativity, and experiments in art forms, are producing a more indeterminate approach to identity. Western biography from this time has more to say about contradictions and fluctuations in identity, and about the unknowability of the self.
    book-quote

  3. Hermione Lee _ Biography: A Very Short

    Johnson argued that the most truthful life-writing is when 'the writer tells his own story', since only he knows the whole truth about himself. {He does not use the word 'autobiography', which only came into circulation in the early 19th century.} Those who write about another may want to over-praise him or 'aggravate his infamy'; those who write about themselves, he says – optimistically – have no 'motive to falsehood' except 'self-love', and we are all on the watch for that.
    book-quote
Categories