Personal Essay Quotes

I decided to write a myth."
"Have you figured out a topic? A moral conundrum?"
"Yes."
"What is it?"
I heard Jack's chair creak.
"It's about how there's no such thing as redemption," I whispered. "How you deserve what you get,and no higher power can save you."
Mrs. Stone didn't answer immediately. The only sound in the room came from my own breathing. "What about heroes?"
I hunched over and scribbled a few lines on my notebook. "There are no heroes." Sure,it wasn't an optimistic paper,but it was the only thing I could write passionately about.
She was quiet for a moment again. When she spoke,her voice was gentle. "Okay. I'm excited to see what you put together."
I nodded.
"And,Mr. Caputo? Everything going well with the personal essay?"
I could only assume he nodded, because Mrs. Stone returned to the front of the classroom. My right hand started to tremble,and I clenched my pencil and began scribbling.
"You don't really believe that, do you?" Jack's voice was soft.
I lifted my head, allowing my eyes to meet his for the first time in weeks. "It doesn't matter what I believe." I looked down at my notebook.
"Wait," he said.
I turned back. "What?"
He shrugged,then spoke in a low murmur. "Just stop hiding behind your hair for a minute."
I closed my eyes,but I didn't turn away. "You're making things difficult, Jack Caputo," I whispered.
"At least you remember my name."
I remembered everyth ~ Brodi Ashton

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel. ~ Alain De Botton

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eds., Modern American Memoirs; Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay; Jane Taylor McDonnell, Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir; and William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. ~ Vivian Gornick

One last characteristic of the memoir that is important to recognize is one which also applies to essays, and which Georg Lukacs described as "the process of judging." This may seem problematic to some, since...we connect it with 'judgmental,' often used nowadays as a derogatory word. But the kind of judgment necessary to the good personal essay, or to the memoir, is not that nasty tendency to oversimplify and dismiss other people out of hand but rather the willingness to form and express complex opinions, both positive and negative.

If the charm of memoir is that we, the readers, see the author struggling to understand her past, then we must also see the author trying out opinions she may later shoot down, only to try out others as she takes a position about the meaning of her story. The memoirist need not necessarily know what she thinks about her subject but she must be trying to find out; she may never arrive at a definitive verdict, but she must be willing to share her intellectual and emotional quest for answers. Without this attempt to make a judgment, the voice lacks interest, the stories, becalmed in the doldrums of neutrality, become neither fiction nor memoir, and the reader loses respect for the writer who claims the privilege of being the hero in her own story without meeting her responsibility to pursue meaning. Self revelation without analysis or understanding becomes merely an embarrassment to both reader and writer. ~ Judith Barrington

The other thing you can do is write a strong personal essay which lets admissions people inside your life, your heart, and your world.
...
Anyway, it can be hard to figure out what to write about, so here are a few suggestions:
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5. Reasons it's wrong to be racist even though it makes sense to you. ~ Eugene Mirman

The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts. In that tradition, I am not a poet or the press, but an essayist, a citizen thinker. ~ Eula Biss

The communication function of modern writers is akin to the ancient role fulfilled by tribal shamans. All writers ultimately perform a shamanistic role in society; their mythmaking voices speak to us from the underworld after their passage to the other side. Writers place themselves in a trance-like state where their unconscious mind dictates to them what to write. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

As a student at the time, I kind of felt like my only options as a nonfiction writer were to either jump on the personal essay bus or linger back at the station, hoping that some other heretofore unknown mode of transportation was going to magically show up to take me where I wanted to go. ~ John D'Agata

Writing is a cerebral journey where the writer molds experience into useful thought capsules and thoughtfully takes recitative inventory of their spiritual depot. The act of personal essay writing is a subtle search to track and discover how a contiguous chain of occurrences links the essayist's case history of rational and irrational behavior. Writing a person's life story fosters acceptance of their prior personal failures and serves to open a doorway to living modestly and harmoniously. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Now the truth is, writing is a great way to deal with a lot of difficult emotional issues. It can be very therapeutic, but that's best done in your journal, or on your blog if you're an exhibitionist. Trying to put a bunch of *specific* stuff from your personal life into your story usually just isn't appropriate unless you're writing a memoir or a personal essay or something of the sort. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

The analytical framework of this comprehensive field study of what it means to be an American examines how a person's personality, culture, technology, occupational and recreational activities affect a person's sense of purposefulness and happiness. The text evaluates the nature of human existence, formation of human social relations, and methods of communication from various philosophic and cultural perspectives. The ultimate goal is to employ the author's own mind and personal experiences as a filter to quantify what it means to live and die as a thinking and reflective person. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The forms of the short, written poem as they have been developed in English over the past few centuries can be usefully seen as compressed, truncated, or fragmented imitations of other verbal forms, especially the play, story, public oration, and personal essay. ~ Robert Scholes

I think a photograph, of whatever it might be - a landscape, a person - requires personal involvement. That means knowing your subject, not just snapping at what's in front of you. ~ Frans Lanting

Anger is a sentry, stalking the edges of our boundaries and standing ready to defend them. ~ Jessica Moore

It is precisely when a person, who is borne down by inner emptiness and weariness or a sense of personal unworthiness, feels that he would like to withdraw from his task, that he should learn what it means to have a duty to perform in the fellowship, and ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Personal Responsibility is the state of being the person who caused something to happen. ~ Sunday Adelaja

I have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people. ~ William Shakespeare

Amy [Winehouse] increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that YouTube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions, or death. ~ Russell Brand

Only through the Eucharist is it possible to live the heroic virtues of Christianity: charity, to the point of forgiving one's enemies; love for those who make us suffer; chastity in every age and situation of life; patience in suffering and when one is shocked by the silence of God in the tragedies of history or of one's own personal existence. You must always be Eucharistic souls in order to be authentic Christians ~ Pope John Paul II

To take another person's life for personal gain is the most selfish act imaginable. Especially when that other person is your clone. ~ Jarod Kintz

Personal feelings don't make for good politics, legal decisions, or business deals. ~ Roger Zelazny

What is will? It is a decision. It is a decision to be something. We really aren't anything in particular. We can be anything. That's the good news. ~ Frederick Lenz

According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for. ~ Allen Tate

The challenge for people today
and it is not and easy one
is to maintain high personal standards even while feeling that one is living in a moral sewer. ~ Nathaniel Branden

A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder. ~ John Dewey

Tailor Made will help Ferrari's clients tailor their cars in a very personal, specific way. It's a bespoke service, like visiting Huntsman or Anderson & Sheppard or whoever your favourite Savile Row tailor is. ~ Lapo Elkann

Life goes by rapidly. Don't delay. Don't put it off. Don't wait until you have some spare time. Don't wait until the time's 'right'. ~ Ken Keyes Jr.

When a young non-white male is stopped and searched at the whim of a police officer, his idea of personal space, privacy and self esteem are shattered, to say nothing of his Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment protections. The damage goes deep quickly and stays. Stop & frisk, as well as a tactic, is also an incitement. ~ Henry Rollins

So basically, it just really represents our band and we didn't even think about that when we decided to call it 'Warpaint'. And then through getting asked questions about "why is that song called 'Warpaint'?" - then we realised, "oh my god! THAT'S why!" And we didn't even know why ... but that's why! And then 'Shadows' is just ... I love that song and it's personal to me. I love how it turned out!! ~ Theresa Wayman

I'm separated by other performers with whom I might be lumped, since what I say is so intensely personal. I'm anti-art and anti-poetry. As much as possible, I want to inflict my personal pain on the rest of society. ~ Lydia Lunch

There is no truth which personal vice will not distort. ~ J.G. Holland

When I put my faith in Jesus Christ as my savior, and I asked him to forgive and to come into my life, and He does - from that moment forward I have established a personal relationship with God that I have to develop, you know, through Bible reading and prayer, and living my life for him. ~ Anne Graham Lotz

A lot of my students have been quite notable. Notable in both the personal sense - people who have changed my life - and notable in that many have gone on to enormous success in their writing careers. Whether or not I had a lot to do with those success stories, I'm very proud and happy for my former students getting on the map. ~ Rob Roberge

Running has made my life worthwhile. I used to be more dead than alive after the personal tragedy in my life. ~ Fauja Singh

Now, most people bear life without any considerable grumbling, and consequently believe in the value of existence, but precisely because each one is solely self-seeking and self-affirming, and does not step out of himself like those exceptions; everything extra-personal is imperceptible to them, or at most seems only a faint shadow. Therefore on this alone is based the value of life for the ordinary everyday man, that he regards himself as more important than the world. The ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

My personal style is ever changing. ~ India De Beaufort

I have a personal barber, Mister C. He lives in Brooklyn, but he travels with me. He used to cut Lady Gaga's hair, but he fired her to work for me. ~ Theophilus London

I've heard that lawyers' children, on seeing their parents in court in the
heat of argument, get the wrong idea: they think opposing counsel to be the personal enemies of their parents, they suffer agonies, and are surprised to see them often go out arm-in-arm with their tormenters during the first recess. This was not true of Jem and me. We acquired no traumas from watching our father win or lose. I'm sorry that I can't provide any drama in this respect; if I did, it would not be true. We could tell, however, when debate became more acrimonious than professional, but this was from watching lawyers other than our father. I never heard Atticus raise his voice in my life, except to a deaf witness. ~ Harper Lee

Investment banking is not a business; it is a personal service where bankers work hand in hand with their clients. And it is a service that must not simply be about making bigger and bigger deals that reap rewards for only a small group of executives. ~ Felix Rohatyn

All of my books are based in some way on my personal experiences, or the experiences of members of my family, or the stories kids would tell me in school. ~ Patricia Reilly Giff

Don't mourn your falls and remains focused by the path that leads to have emotional stability, economic and personal satisfaction. Be brave!!! ~ Piro J.M.

On the surface, reality may appear the same each day, but in essence, we are new every moment of our lives. The potential for change and growth is unlimited if we allow ourselves to surrender to the flow. ~ Dorit Brauer

Once you acknowledge the simple truth that the key to your own personal joy is nothing more than an emotion that resides within you and can only ever be experienced in the present moment – the Prize of Happiness will be yours. ~ D.S. Luca

Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy. ~ Aldo Leopold

The essay form has superceded the novel as the vehicle that best suggests the prevailing apocalyptic gestalt, and as the talisman that is most able to repel the onset of paralysing dread. ~ Adam Parfrey

After the opera house, we toured our way through a couple of churches and visited the Mark Twain museum. My personal highlight was the toilet labeled Mark Twain sat here. ~ Lisa Kessler

Then, accepting the help of God and of God's signs, he allows his personal legend to guide him toward the tasks that life has reserved for him. ~ Paulo Coelho

I am the only person responsible for my success and failure.
I am where I am because of the choices I have made. ~ Josh Hatcher

My personal feeling is that oral sex is against nature. ~ Pat Robertson

But this is also why Jesus calls us to come to HIm. By coming to Jesus, we remember who we are and who we are not. By coming to Him, we come face to face with God and with ourselves. "It is only in our encounter with a personal God," writes philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, "that we become fully aware of our condition as creatures, and fling from us the last particle of self-glory. ~ Hannah Anderson

No one can ever save someone else, you know? We can only save ourselves. You know that, don't you? ~ Carrie Jones

There are things I've done in the past I'm not proud of - and I could talk about them if I wanted to - but I don't reveal my secrets ... I prefer certain things to remain personal; there have to be boundaries. And I don't think you need a scandal to have an interesting story. ~ Faith Hill

I have always kept my personal relationships pretty private, whether it's intimate or my family or friends - at least in videos. It's always been something that I've sworn off from sharing online. ~ Tyler Oakley