Quotes about autobiography

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Every person has a story every person has a wound that he or she seeks to heal.

Roland Barthes -

I have a disease I see language.

Young - Initiation

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience.

W.H. Auden - Selected Essays

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

Michael Spehn - and Love in the Midst of Tragedy

It was her smile that took me captive the day we met, and never once let me go. There was an authentic quality to her smile that made people stop and look; a basic human truth that seemed to emanate from deep within her and naturally find its way upward and out. Like the magma flow from Vesuvius, there was simply no stopping Cathy's smile. It could freeze people where they stood and hold them there, sometimes forever.That's what happened to me anyway.

Bill Bryson - The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream — so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Autobiographical writing stands as lasting memorial for enduring the travails of an earthly life. Writing is an apt technique to score our storyline into the annuals of time. To endure a mortal life is merely a transitory experience whereas writing about how one lived is an internalized exposition of what it means to be human. Writing is an external exhibition injecting the author into the world’s consciousness.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Human souls enfold the elemental elements that we configure to provide our own distinctive explanation of what it means to be alive. By opening our hearts and minds, by engaging in intuitive self-exploration, by telling our life stories full of prejudices and mindboggling idiosyncrasies, and by listening to the multivariate stories of our brethren, we add a ray of light to the spiraling consciousness of humankind.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Telling our personal story reveals the shape shifting landscape of our mind.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Storytelling entails weaving a narrative out of the disturbing, strange, inspirational, and unremarkable detritus of life. By picking among the litter of our personal experiences to select evocative anecdotes to weave into a narrative format, we reveal which of life’s legendary offerings prove the most sublime to us. Acts of omission are momentous. Our narration of personal sketches divulge what factoids inspire us or do not stir us into action, or contain obdurate truths that prove virtually im

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

People naturally impose a narrative story-line upon their experiences. Autobiographical writing allows a person to cast their experiences into a narrative thread and organize their thoughts based not upon conjecture but with applied reason.

Joy Harjo - Crazy Brave

I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Writing a personal essay or memoir addresses how a person thinks and behaves in the context of society’s prevailing moral and ethical codes, informal rules, laws, and customs. A self-ethnographer emphasis what he or she considers important regarding how people perceive and categorize the world, their meaning for behavior, how they imagine and explain things, and ascertaining what has meaning for them. Expository writing, a discursive examination of a broad field of subjects, is one method of coh

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Attempting to express a person’s objective reality and subjective state of mind with the written word is an endless task because writing alters our perception of reality and amends our mental equilibrium.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

When writing a comprehensive self-investigatory scroll, the writer attempts to weave a network of strands capable of enmeshing all sizes of ideas including those with no obvious interconnection. The writer must also trace all lingering thoughts to their original source in personal experiences, and revaluate each exquisite nuance notched into a person’s conscious mind including acts of depravity, violence, and the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace.

Raul Ramos y Sanchez -

Even wondered about the difference?Autobiography: The usually self-serving accounts of personal accomplishments by a public figure.Memoir: The usually self-serving accounts of someone whose only accomplishments are often self-pity and vindictiveness.

Dimitra Ekmektsis - Confessions of a High-Priced Call Girl: Second Edition

The memoirs of call girls are much in demand these days - a millennial craze.

Roberto Bolaño - 1998-2003

Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.

Gavin MacLeod - Faith and Life

Audrey Hepburn, as famous as she was, packed her own suitcases... I don’t know why that struck me, but it did. 'She has a servant’s heart,' I thought.

Jack Kerouac -

The Grim Reaper isn't grim at all; he's a life-saver. He isn't grim because he isn't anything. . . . he is nothing. And nothing is a hell of a lot better than anything. So long, boys.

Gavin MacLeod - Faith and Life

Mary [Tyler Moore] was absolutely brilliant... She is a fabulous actress. She can do anything.

Gavin MacLeod - Faith and Life

If I can do it, anybody can do it. Willpower is strong! I believe that. You just have to have faith in yourself—and God—and make sure you know where your priorities stand.

K.H. Rennie -

You are not yourself in autobiography. It is never going to be you, it is only words on a page. Memories are unreliable, so adding the magic of imagination will make your story come alive.

Clare Balding - My Animals and Other Family

I loved him with a passion of which I had no idea I was capable. I loved him partly to defend him against the world and partly because I genuinely believed we were soul mates.

Samuel Goldwyn -

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

Havelock Ellis -

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Federico Fellini -

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

A shaman and a writer each serve as their communities’ seers by engaging in extraordinary acts of conscientious study of the past and the present and predicting the future. An inner voice calls to the shaman and an essayistic writer to answer the call that vexes the pernicious spirit of their times. Shamanistic writers induce a trance state of mind where they lose contact with physical reality through a rational disordering of the senses, in an effort to encounter for the umpteenth time the grea

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Writing is an exhausting and demoralizing task that destroys human conceits. Writing an elongated series of personal essay opens a person’s mind to explore paradoxes and discover previously unrealized personal truths. Writing is as arduous as any trek into the wilderness. Every sentence takes a writer deeper into the jungle of the mind, a world of frightening inconsistencies created by our waking life’s desire that the world of chaos conform to our convenience.

Tam Hodge - And Now I Choose: A Story for Those Who Believe They Have No Choice

I have found out the hard way that the path from victim to victory hinges on one word…Choose.

J.R. Rim -

Advice is autobiography.

Ana Claudia Antunes - The Tao of Physical and Spiritual

People ask me where I got my x-ray powers. I inherited them from my parents in parental supervision. Erase the dots and your doubts if you think that I was 'raysed' alone.

Brian K. Vaughan -

Anyone with an autobiography is almost definitely an evil piece of shit.

M.F. Moonzajer - HATRED AND MADNESS

One day someone is going to read my autobiography and say “Wow, what a horror novel

Brooke Stonex - Raised in Hell: The Chilling and Overwhelming true story of internet icon Brooke Stonex

No child should have to see all that I have seen

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our persona

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Narrative writing represents a personal attempt to quantify and understand the psychological singularities behind the author’s personality traits as delineated by winnowed list of formative life experiences.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

The womb of the world births us. My filth comes from the same earthwork that gives rise to all stories. My interior light connects me with all the other creatures that inhabit this world of rocks, air, grass, woods, and water. My genetic code links me inextricably with all of nature. I enter the medley in the river of life with the ability to respond as life unfolds before my childlike eyes. My homemade medicinal poultice might not be of any benefit to other people. Nonetheless, we should each w

Paige Garland - Prison post: Letters of support for Peter Greste

I am halfway through Hillary Clinton's latest called "Living History"...pretty lighthearted on the scale...unlike David Hick's autobiography...I had to skip a couple of hundred pages in the middle of that one because it was too distressing for me to read. Undoubtedly yours will be the same...I will read the beginning, skip all the awful bit in the middle and read your happy ever after bit at the end.

Virginia Woolf - Moments of Being

These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.

Virginia Woolf - Moments of Being

If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - than my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Unless we understand how the twists and turns of life operate to make us, we cannot comprehend who and what we are. Without self-awareness, we are blind to registering the intertexture of other people’s inner life. Gracefully enduring personal hardships expands our minds to extend sympathy and empathy for other people. By casting our personal life experiences into a supple storytelling casing, we create the translucent membrane that quarters the fusion of our flesh, nerves, blood, and bones. Sel

Osman Gulum - Climbing Mountains

I don,t just want success for my self ,I want my success to benefit others .Osman Gulum

Fran Drescher - Enter Whining

Know before whom thou stands. Understand your friends for who they are, not who you wish them to be. Accept them for their flaws as well as their attributes. Turn to them for their strengths, what good stuff they can bring to your life, and forget about the rest. To ask for more only sets you up for failure.

David Sedaris - Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, "Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.

Craig Briggs - Journey to a Dream

As well as writing, 2004 saw my first attempt at wine making: the elixir of life. Unfortunately, my effort tasted more like the elixir of death.

Albina Hume -

Live your dreams, not your fears! A.Hume

Yiyun Li - from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

Charlotte Eriksson - Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps

It's about personal development. It's about creating your own character and pushing it to the limit. It's about pushing yourself so far out of your own and everybody else's idea of who you are and what you're capable of, that you no longer believe in limits. It's about reaching beyond your so-called potential, because your potential is never where you or anyone else expects it to be, not even close. It's about being able to say with the last breath of your life “I used all my potential and all m

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Telling our personal story constitutes an act of consciousness that defines the ethical lining of a person’s constitution. Recounting personal stories promotes personal growth, spurs the performance of selfless deeds, and in doing so enhances the ability of the equitable eye of humanity to scroll rearward and forward. Every person must become familiar with our communal history of struggle, loss, redemption, and meaningfully contemplate the meaning behind our personal existence in order to draft

Nigel Goodall - The Secret World of Johnny Depp: The Intimate Biography of Hollywood's Best-Loved Rebel

This is a rumour-filled society and if people want to sit around and talk about whom I've dated, then I'd say they have a lot of spare time and should consider other topics. Or masturbation. - Johnny Depp

James Patterson -

To me, that's the ultimate isolation - to be separated from my own mind.

A. Somebody - The Autobiography of A Somebody

Monotony is the only reward of the cautious

Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X

How is it possible to write one's autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?

Frederick Weisel -

Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing—escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you’ll find a compulsion to flee—a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores. — Teller: A Novel

Howard Marks - Mr. Nice

Expensive illogicalities and inefficiencies do not worry the monsters of American bureaucracy, and the taxpayers are enthusiastic and eager to spend fortunes in the name of fighting crime. Prison places cost the US taxpayer more than university places. The American belief that prisons are the best way to combat crime has led to an incarceration rate that is at least five times that of almost any industrialised nation. Overcrowding is endemic. Conditions are appalling, varying from windowless, se

Gary "Gunz" Govich - Career Criminal: My Life in the Russian Mob Until the Day I Died

Fear is the primary tool of the mafiya. It's how they contain their vast criminal enterprise. For the mafiya, fear is the grease in the wheel. Fear is much stronger than love | Fear lasts much longer. Love fades and is replaced by hatred and contempt. Fear lingers and brings forth other emotions such as doubt. Fear encourages procrastination and cowardice. Besides, you always hurt the ones you love. Most are too afraid to hurt the ones they fear.

Gary "Gunz" Govich - Career Criminal: My Life in the Russian Mob Until the Day I Died

Wanting to leave communist Russia is all fine and well | Actually leaving the country is where you might run into a few setbacks. Obtaining a visa for a simple vacation outside the soviet block was a long and arduous process. To immigrate to a free society was about as easy as finding whiskey in a church.

Gary "Gunz" Govich - Career Criminal: My Life in the Russian Mob Until the Day I Died

The Jewish center on Kings Highway scheduled an interview at the local labor hall downtown for my father to meet one of their counselors in order to asses his skills and capabilities. When my father sat down with the fellow and asked all sorts of questions, his reply was a blank stare. Boris didn't understand a word. He did speak a little English | He knew two words, pipe and chair. So Boris did the smart thing. He kept saying pipe over and over. Whatever question, he simply replied... pipe. The

Randy Alcorn - Possessions and Eternity

What you do with your resources in this life is your autobiography.

Jess Walter - Beautiful Ruins

all we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character--what we believe--none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!

Frederick Weisel -

Aren’t autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don’t we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am.

Kelly Cherry - The Exiled Heart: A Meditative Autobiography

I didn't find my story; it found me, as autobiography always does: finds you out in your deepest most private places.

Jonathan Anthony Burkett - Neglected But Undefeated

Do you consider yourself a blessing or just another person?

Tony Alleyne - Click Bang!

Those is seek to profit from the torment of others will eventually pay the piper

China Miéville - This Census-Taker

You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.

Susan Q. Knittle-Hunter - Living with Periodic Paralysis: The Mystery Unraveled

Periodic Paralysis is not our friend

Jürgen Habermas -

[Jürgen Habermas' obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty]One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took wit

Jeffrey L. Staley - and the American West in the Gospel of John

But you can't fault me on my footnotes. I've worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of putting footnotes in chapter 5, the autobiographical chapter, started out simply as a joke. Who but a biblical scholar would think of footnoting an autobiography? But the joke quickly got out of hand and become a significant part of that chapter. I plan someday to write a scholarly article consisting of a si

Deborah L. Parker - Navigating Life's Roadways: Stories of Insight from My Odyssey and Inspiration for Your Journey

Happy 3rd anniversary Navigating Life's Roadways!This book is a charge and blessing from above. Writing it has been on my radar for a while.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Every human being carries with them the stories of their ancestors, the story of their generation, and the rudiments of pliable clay to build future storylines that will shape their community of kindred souls. Storytelling unites us as a species and supplies texture to our lives. By listening to other people’s stories and by sharing our personal story, we deftly weave the threads that compose the sacred hoop of the tribe.

Stephen Fry - The Fry Chronicles

Those who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.

Deanie Humphrys-Dunne - Tails of Sweetbrier

Have you ever really wanted to be able to do something, but you came across a roadblock of some kind?You have a difficult choice. I made that choice once and it changed my whole life, by giving me experiences I never would have had if I took the easy street and had not tried.

Andre Agassi - Agassi

A ball feels different off every player's racket-there are minute but concrete subtleties of force and spin. Now, hitting with her (Steffi Graf), I feel her subtleties. It's like touching her, though we're forty feet apart. Every forehand is foreplay.

David Millar - Racing Through the Dark

I was awarded 'Most Aggressive Rider of the Day', generally given to the most spectacular loser of the day.

Akira Kurosawa - Something Like an Autobiography

In the pre-war era when itinerant home-remedy salesmen still wandered the country, they had a traditional patter for selling a potion that was supposed to be particularly effective in treating burns and cuts. A toad with four legs in front and six behind would be placed in a box with mirrors lining the four walls. The toad, amazed at its own appearance from every angle, would break into an oily sweat. This sweat would be collected and simmered for 3,721 days while being stirred with a willow bra

Frederick Douglass - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

...The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

Uri Jerzy Nachimson - The Polish Patriot

Love and respect are above any law

Stephen Fry - The Fry Chronicles

Thos who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.

Patricia St. John - An Ordinary Woman's Extraordinary Faith

I feel like a little tug in a great storm. But I'm fastened to a great ship on ahead. It's going into port and can't lose its way.

Steven C. Smith - Off the Rails: Excerpts from My Life

I just want to this about that.

Bob Dylan - Vol. 1

Opportunities may come along for you to convert something -something that exists into something that didn't yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain. It's not like you see songs approaching and invite them in. It's not that easy. You want to write songs that are bigger than life. You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen. You have

Boris Pasternak - Safe Conduct: An Autobiography and Other Writings

The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect to meet it. It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, in the biographical columns of his followers. The more self-contained the individuality from which the life derives, the more collective, without any figurative speaking, is its story.

Bob Dylan - Vol. 1

..my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn't understand me. The town he lived in and the town I lived in were not the same.

John Berger -

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

Felix Adler -

[His research into biblical criticism had lead him to the conclusion that most of what was contained in traditional religion simply wasn't true]Was I to lie in order to teach the truth? ...Was I to repeat these words? It was impossible. It was certain they would stick in my throat. On these grounds the separation was decided by me.

Don DeLillo -

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

Rick Barnett -

Mistakes? That's why they put erasers on pencils.

Rick Barnett -

The features of character are carved out of adversity.

Bob Dylan - Vol. 1

It seemed I'd always been chasing after something, anything that moved -a car, a bird, a blowing leaf -anything that might lead me into some more lit place, some unknown land downriver. I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in, what society could do with you.

Bob Dylan -

The dominant myth of the day seemed to be that anybody could do anything, even go to the moon. You could do whatever you wanted -in the ads and in the articles, ignore your limitations, defy them. If you were an indecisive person, you could become a leader and wear lederhosen. If you were a housewife, you could become a glamour girl with rhinestone sunglasses. Are you slow witted? No worries -you can be an intellectual genius. If you're old, you can be young. Anything was possible. It was almost

Mark Jackman - There's Something About Dying

Many great people had been considered to be boring, like Nigel Mansell, but anyone who had read the racing driver’s autobiography, "Clutch Down, Dick Out", would know that perception was way off the mark.

Gloria Steinem - My Life on the Road

Everyone has a home but me.

Morrissey -

I understand feminism to be a social savior because it liberates everyone without exclusion, whereas masculinism damns itself by measuring a man's health by the amount of sexual gratification he receives.

Meghan Lamb -

Everything bleeds into everything and fiction is just this funny desperate little attempt to staunch the bleeding.

Cheryl Strayed - Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked. Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply di

Ana Claudia Antunes - How to Make a Book

Life's a book filled on pages Just awaiting to be written.Some don't open it for ages,Maybe afraid of being bitten.

Katandra Jackson Nunnally - Carnal Sobriety

Life is a delicate dance. We live in a society that governs we all get along. The invisible fine print, the unwritten rules and regulations state that we appease to each other's nature and in doing so, we by nature, seek to please.

Harry W. Kroto -

The humanitarian philosophies that have been developed (sometimes under some religious banner and invariably in the face of religious opposition) are human inventions, as the name implies - and our species deserves the credit. I am a devout atheist - nothing else makes any sense to me and I must admit to being bewildered by those, who in the face of what appears so obvious, still believe in a mystical creator. However I can see that the promise of infinite immortality is a more palatable proposi

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autobiography

biography

life