Personal Essays Quotes

Talking aloud to oneself is usually indicative of a mental malady. Self-talk is also the stock in trade of an essay writer. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The thing I most fear when writing is my paucity of ideas and the thinness of my emotional lining. I audaciously resolve to write about my greatest fears in an effort to transcend what I most despise about myself – intellectual and emotional poverty. Perchance by making use of all my thoughts and matrix of emotions – both positive and negative – I can escape the labyrinth constructed of my terrible ignorance of the world and an appalling lack of self-awareness. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A person frequently writes in order to escape madness and crushing despondency by culling moral lesson and healing growth serum from personal experiences. Akin to riders on a storm, and a dog without a bone, we only come to understand our limits by enduring suffering. Only by deliberately confronting the essential facts of life does a person come to understand humanity. Without suffering the full brunt of love, sorrow, pain, illness, death, and accepting the relentless march of time a person never comes to know anything at all regarding the wonderful mystery of life. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Acceptance is a deceptive word. It suggests compliance, a consenting to my condition and to who I have become. This form of acceptance is often seen as weakness, submission. We say I accept my punishment. Or I accept your decision. But such assent, while passive in essence, does provide the stable, rocklike foundation for coping with a condition that will not go away. It is a powerful passivity, the Zen of Illness, that allows for endurance. ~ Floyd Skloot

Writers allow us to see ourselves more clearly, they express spiritual signposts that assist us find ourselves. Writers' self-revelations allow us to grasp personal reflections that remain unrealized and indistinct within ourselves. Nuggets of personal perception remain veiled, until we read carefully chosen words sharing the author's crystallized perceptions. Provocative authors resolutely tap into that robust vein of common yearning and assiduously engineer their way through humankind's rampant library of collective neurosis. Reading a master's scintillating prose allows our own inchoate thoughts to shape up under the splendid beam of sunlight that they cast onto pages bearing their soul's freshly minted words. Their astutely crafted pages conveying everlasting imagery immunizes their work from the harshness of time's relentless march forward. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing is work with a purpose. Writers all throughout history labored to discover a spiritual and life-affirming means to live and attempted to share their faithful or pessimistic vision with other people. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Perhaps I can follow a heroic existential nihilist's sterling example of surviving the harshness of reality by employing an attentive narrative examination of my recalcitrant life to extract shards of personal truth and elicit a synthesizing purposefulness of my being from the darkness, anarchy, and chaos of existence. Perhaps through the act of engaging in a deliberative examination of the ontological mystery of being and investigating the accompanying stark brutal doubt that renders a materialistic life intolerably senseless, absurd, and meaningless, I can confront the baffle of being and establish a guiding set of personal values to live by in an indifferent world. Perhaps by using the contemplative tools of narrative storytelling, I can strictly scrutinize the key leaning rubrics veiled within an array of confusing personal life experiences. Perhaps by engaging in a creative act of discovery I can blunt the pain and anguish that comes from the nightmarish experience of suffering from an existential crisis. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The judicious words of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the first existentialist philosopher, are apropos to end this lumbering manuscript.
1."One must learn to know oneself before knowing anything else."
2."Life always expresses the results of our dominate thoughts."
3."Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are."
4."Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own."
5."Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all."
6."Don't forget to love yourself."
7."Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."
8."Life has its own hidden forces, which you can only discover by living."
9."The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, or read about, nor seen, but if one will, are to be lived."
10."Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown."
11."It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate on only what is most significant and important."
12."To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself."
13."Since my earliest childhood, a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic, if it is pulled out I shall die."
14."A man who as a physical being is always turned to the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside of him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him."
15."Just as in earthly life lovers ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing is a form of intense thinking that takes a person on a journey into previously uncharted territory of the writer's mind. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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

Shorter work - personal essays and book reviews - allow me to take a break from working on a book, which is good for the book and for its author. ~ Kathryn Harrison

Life is transient and death is unfathomable, but questions nonetheless abound. What is the driving purpose behind the prosodic life of an ordinary person such as me? What emotional rhythms, pitches, pauses, stresses, and intonations drive the meter of person's life? When the church bells toll my parting day, what tone will it strike in the hearts of other people, if any? Is there a person whoever traversed this crusty rock that we call planet Earth who did not wish for other people to remember them after their death? I confess sharing the vain longing of all men, however humble, to be remembered, not for the crimes that I committed but for fully expressing the poetic gift of life. When I ask what other people will think when I die, I must also ask why I lived, what did I live for, and what joy did I bring other people, if any. What acts, thoughts, and deeds make people beloved? What resounding chime resonates with all loving people? What magical filament binds us? What serves as the ethereal umbilical cord that causes all conscience stricken humans to crave the same universal sense of being? ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Because of social media, we have a lot of personal essays floating around; you see them on Facebook: everyone's either reading them or writing them. Some of them are great; some of them are diary entries put forth as essays. ~ Meghan Daum

We seek to understand ourselves by telling how we go about securing inner peace, acceptance, and satisfaction intermeshed with layers of pure happiness. Stories allow us to explore the mystery of the universe, share unique experiences, and express personal comprehension. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When I use people I know, all of my instincts seem to go dead, and if I'm getting anywhere near myself then I can't do it. It's actually a real weakness! I hate writing personal essays, I don't think I'm especially good at it. I like just encountering [my characters], discovering them. I love the escape of just being surrounded by all these people who are nothing like people I know. But I don't find it hard to be in the middle of a different life, with a different set of habits and way of thinking and talking. That seems to come easily to me. ~ Jennifer Egan

Essayist dabble with the ache for what was lost, bemoan the slippage of time, express the desire to recapture the passage of time, exhibit reluctant acceptance for the way things are, celebrate the beautiful and the sublime, and issue a silent prayer for the mere fact that the author survived the conflicts of today and shall eyewitness another dawn. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

For years following the death of my mother, I wanted to write about her. I started writing what I thought of as personal essays about growing up as her child, but I never could finish any of them. I think I was too close to that loss, and too eager to try and resolve things, to make her death make sense. ~ Tracy K. Smith

When it comes to the personal essays I write, I just convince myself that no one will ever read them. ~ Dani Shapiro

Writing is a method to stanch a person's deepest lacerations. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader. ~ Dani Shapiro

Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays. ~ Kate Christensen

When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped. ~ Stephen Vincent Benet

Personal essays are often nostalgia-fused narratives written by authors with authenticity fetishes. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writers resist the terrifying silence that engulfs us. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing enables a person to build a protective barrier shielding them from an adverse environment, scrutinize their circumstances, and discover how to employ new perceptions to center oneself in a world filled with strife, conflict, violence, affection, beauty, splendor. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

But what I don't like - and what I don't think either Seymour or Buddy would like, either, as a matter of fact - is the way you talk about all these people. I mean you don't just despise what they represent - you despise them. It's too damn personal, Franny. I mean it. You get a real little homicidal glint in your eye when you talk about this Tupper, for instance. All this business about his going into the men's room to muss his hair before he comes in to class. All that. He probably does - it goes with everything else you've told me about him. I'm not saying it doesn't. But it's none of your business, buddy, what he does with his hair. It would be all right, in a way, if you thought his personal affectations were sort of funny. Or if you felt a tiny bit sorry for him for being insecure enough to give himself a little pathetic goddam glamour. But when you tell me about it - and I'm not fooling, now - you tell me about it as though his hair was a goddamn personal enemy of yours. That is not right - and you know it. If you're going to to war against the System, just do your shooting like a nice, intelligent girl - because the enemy's there, and not because you don't like his hairdo or his goddam necktie. ~ J.D. Salinger

006 was such an interesting character and the film really explored his friendship with Bond and how it all went wrong, so it was a very personal journey for both characters. ~ Sean Bean

Actual happiness is sometimes confused with the pursuit of it; and the most mindless and crass how-tos can get jumbled in with the modestly useful, the appealingly personal, and the genuinely interesting. ~ Amy Bloom

Health care's complicated, can be misrepresented, it's personal, it can spark fear, it's expensive, and the people who have got the money want to keep it. ~ William J. Clinton

[Shakespeare realized that] Women are able to understand themselves better on a personal level and survive in the world if they dress in men's clothing, thus living underground, safe (...). The presence of women disguising themselves as men dictates that the play be a comedy; women remaining in their frocks, a tragedy. In four great tragedies -Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear- almost all the women die (...).
How much the women have to adhere to the rules and regulations of their enviroment makes a large difference. Once Rosalind [disguised as a man in As You Like It] has run away from the court, she has no institutional structures to deal with. Ophelia [in her frocks] is surrounded tightly by institutional structures of family, court, and politics; only by going mad can be get out of it all. ~ Tina Packer

The victim mindset dilutes the human potential. By not accepting personal responsibility for our circumstances, we greatly reduce our power to change them. ~ Steve Maraboli

It's the difference between watching a football game between two teams you don't care about, and watching a game where you have some kind of personal identity with one of the teams, if only a huge bet. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone. ~ William James

The four Keltar Druids brought their wives and children. They breed like it's their personal mission to populate their country in case somebody attacks again, as if anybody wants the bloody place. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Your body is molecular structure your body is a massive energy at a very high speed of vibration. ~ Bob Proctor

Marv stared at his phone. Kids these days. It was like on that day in school when they taught personal responsibility, this entire fucking generation had banged in sick. ~ Dennis Lehane

A sociopath, on the other hand, has the same regard for financial obligations as he does to personal ones: no remorse, no conscience. Get what you want now, and damn the consequences later. ~ Mary Jo Buttafuoco

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

Obstacles in your life are not in your way, they are the way. ~ John Bruna

I'm not the best singer in the world, but the albums have always been personal. They're stories about me and what I'm going through. ~ Kaskade

The Ed Hardy man is confident with a strong sense of personal style. He is not afraid to be seen and take risks. He enjoys comfort and flexible style, yet he wants to stand apart from the crowd. ~ Christian Audigier

To those who have neither public nor private affections, the excitements of life are much curtailed, and in any case dwindle in value as the time approaches when all selfish interests must be terminated by death: while those who leave after them objects of personal affection, and especially those who have also cultivated a fellow-feeling with the collective interests of mankind, retain as lively an interest in life on the eve of death as in the vigour of youth and health. ~ John Stuart Mill

I try to work out with my personal trainer for an hour, four times a week - we mainly concentrate on weights and running. If I'm on the road I sometimes do DVD work-outs in my hotel room - P90X and Insanity are a couple of my favourites. ~ Fergie

I try not to have personal problems, I do that by telling everyone about them!!! ~ Neil Leckman

While there is always room for improvement and personal growth, it is important to remember that you are enough in this moment - just as you are. ~ John Bruna

These coupling certainly do not fit with the mainstream idea that genes, or at least organisms, are hell-bent on reproducing themselves. They do fit, however, with the idea of a social role for sex, and they fit with the idea that sexual reproduction is a spandrel, a by-product of some other phenomenon. If Roughgarden is on to something, she believes it could have cultural as well as scientific implications. The orthodoxy of biology has corroded our culture like battery acid, she says, In general, we play out the roles prescribed for us by that culture - aggressive male and coy female - because deviation from its "norm" results in emotional and physical violence, bigotry, personal guilt, and criminalized behaviors. If biology has been getting it wrong though, the new orthodoxy could trigger an infusion of tolerance; perhaps the anomalous prevalence of sexual reproduction will end up having deeper repercussions outside of science than within it. ~ Michael Brooks

The purest joy in the world is joy in Christ Jesus. When the Spirit is poured down, his people get very near and clear views of the Lord Jesus. They eat his flesh and drink his blood. They come to a personal cleaving to the Lord. They taste that the Lord is gracious. His blood and righteousness appear infinitely perfect, full and free to their soul. They sit under his shadow with great delight ... They lean on the Beloved. They find infinite strength in him for the use of their soul - grace for grace - all they can need in any hour of trial and suffering to the very end. ~ Robert Murray M'Cheyne

The most profound personal growth does not happen while reading a book or meditating. It happens in the throes of conflict, when you are angry, afraid, frustrated. It happens when you are doing the same old thing and you suddenly realize that you have a choice. ~ Vironika Tugaleva

What's your personal computer, anyways? Your personal computer should be something that's always on your person. ~ Bill Joy

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

And conversely, didn't you know that the reverse is true as well? For within this message is another, more insidious message. If a lighter and leaner you is a better you, then if you are currently overweight, then of course you are led to believe that you are not "good enough" just the way you are right now. And from here the personal angst begins. ~ Scott Abel

He used the word savages with affection, as if he liked them a little for it. In his nature was a respect for wildness. He saw it as a personal challenge, something that could be put right with an idea or a machine. He felt he had the answer to most problems, if anyone cared to listen. ~ Paul Theroux

As education becomes inclusive, introspective, cosmic, promoting whole populations to power and privilege, it enthrones a vast, invisible, personal rule over the common mind. ~ Amos Bronson Alcott

Criticism and rejection are not personal insults, but your artistic component will not know that. It will quiver and wince and run to cover, and you will have trouble in luring it out again to observe and weave tales and find words for all the thousand shades of feeling that go to make up a story. ~ Dorothea Brande

Our identities are as fluid as our personal experiences are diverse. ~ Raquel Cepeda

This obstinate will to personal happiness is the cause of unrest and division in your soul. Give it up and work against it: the rest will be given you without effort. ~ Tito Colliander

Make treating yourself a priority and always remember your life is happening now. Don't put off all your dreams and pleasures to another day. In any balanced personal definition of success there has to be a powerful element of living life in the present. ~ Mireille Guiliano

The right of personal freedom recedes before the duty to preserve the race. ~ Adolf Hitler

The Carousel of Progress was a physical representation of Walt's personal philosophy that people, despite their foibles, were basically decent, and that life was good in any era and would only keep getting better. ~ Jim Korkis

When you present something that you have worked on to somebody else, for some reason that is the moment when you can see everything that you have done wrong. They may or may not agree, but it is more of a personal thing for me. It is that I am looking at it because you are self conscious and suddenly there is someone in the room that is seeing it for the first time. ~ Michael Giacchino

Whatever the composition of a firm, if it is to do good business it should be a place where everyone is encouraged to progress toward complexity- or at the very least a place that does not make it more difficult to achieve personal growth. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Writing is extremely personal, and that's the joy of it for me. ~ Steve Martin

Persistence is the mother of personal change. ~ Robin S. Sharma

The earth will support anything that supports life. What I have found after a soul retrieval is that one cannot "numb out" anymore. Each and every one of us must make personal and planetary decisions to stop abusing life. Whether a person a has to give up an abusive relationship, take a more active political role, or increase awareness of how we continue to abuse our environment, we all now have to be responsible. Being responsible means responding to what is needed. We find a need to wake up and change our reality to a stance of power ... ~ Sandra Ingerman

A personal brand is relevant to people who sell or create something relevant to who they are as a person. If you're not in that boat, which most people are not, personal branding makes no sense. ~ Tucker Max

For my own personal growth I had to set out on my own. ~ Frank Press

The moment we see beyond our personal desires to be felt sympathy for, that is the time we can actually start the journey to that final destination of true forgiveness. ~ Stephen Richards