A Quote by Louis Fischer
Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.
Related Quotes
I have always looked at the world through the prism of money to some degree. If you could follow the money, it explains a lot of things, in all sorts of aspects of the world. You can look at politics through the prism of money. You can look at art through the prism of money. You can look at sports through the prism of money.
Like white light refracted through a prism and split into many colors, God's eternal love-nature, expressed through the prism of time, becomes God's multicolored love story. History is His story.
Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.
A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always bang up against history.
It's very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places - to kind of look at things through the 'noble innocents' prism or through the 'chronically dysfunctional' prism, and I suspect that is so often the case.
I do see the ministry of Human Resources Development through the prism of gender. I see it through the prism of capabilities.
I think the British learn their history through the prism of this gallery of grotesques known as the royals.
When you read a history or biography you are entitled to imagine that it is as accurate as the authors can make it. That research has gone into it and we say "This is a history of the civil war, this is a biography of Lincoln" whatever. But you don't make any such supposition when you say "This is a historical novel."
Even though we are a nation that's becoming a minority country, we still have this view where everything is seen through the prism of the dominant culture, which really means white.
Once you're a parent, male or female, every single thing that happens in your life is seen through the prism of being a parent.
When we describe what the other person is really like, I suppose we often picture what we want. We look through the prism of our need.
I believe no matter how much you research a person's life. No matter how long you spend, the person always remains a mystery. I go by this quote that Mark Twain said about the definition of a biography: a biography is the clothes and buttons of a man or a woman but the real story is in the person's head and that you can never know. I don't think it's possible to get the whole picture, ever.
When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call "white" is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion.
When my work does speak to audiences, when it creates audiences around it, I feel a little less crazy because what that means is that there are folks out there who are interested in thinking about themselves and the world through a prism. The prism is a labor and there can be a pleasure in labor.
[On writing biography:] If you wish to see a person you must not start by seeing through him.
Writing history and biography for kids calls for special skills that can only be acquired through practice and that are different from those required for an adult audience.
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