Reputation is in itself only a farthing candle, of a wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit. – James Russell Lowell

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written. – Mark Twain, Autobiography, 1924

The hardest prisons to break out of are the ones we build ourselves. – Author unknown