c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
When the fear of failure triumphs over the repugnance of mediocrity, we must resign ourselves to the status quo. Every change, every opportunity to do something different will send us running to hide beneath a cover of excuses and complacency. Those few courageous souls who delve into the lands where they risk failure, will be soundly ridiculed. They will be condemned not because they dream, but rather for making their dreams real and destroying the illusion that all that can be thought has been thought, all that can be done has been done, and all that can be felt has been felt. In their enthusiastic insolence, they see life filled with infinite possibilities and they know they must chart their own course, even if they must go alone.
— D.A. Blankinship, The Scoloderus Conspiracy
We feel happy when we accomplish something great, and our hearts filled with satisfaction about what we achieved
— Abdulkareem Bkar
The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves.
— Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety
I've been guilty of over analyzing & under achieving.
— Steve Supple
Never a horse that can’t be rode and never a rider that can’t be throwed. (I’ll pass this off as my own, but I really stole it from my father, a cowboy and rodeo rider in his younger years.)
— Earle Gray
The greatest investment one can ever make is the investment into humanity, for an achievement based on positive influence into people's life can stand the test of time, survive through the mortality of men and resound endlessly through posterity
— Uzoma Ezeson
Still the heights of flying remains to be arrived.Still the wise lessons of life remains to be experienced.Its only the handful of accomplishments has been achieved.The real destiny is yet to be won.
— Ishwar Jha
Age is a state of mind.
— Ken Norton
What gets measured (and clearly defined) does get done.
— Mike Schmoker
As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.
— Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
I'm often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.
— Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself.In reality, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.
— Susanna Kaysen
Each of us is a book waiting to be written, and that book, if written, results in a person explained.
— Thomas M. Cirignano, The Constant Outsider
I learned in therapy the word "No" is a complete sentence.
— Jaycee Dugard, A Stolen Life
I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let's see, one hundred, two... yes, you'll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look more whole, gives me something outside myself to care for. When I'm with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks, the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself.
— Julie Gregory, Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood
Chasing angels or fleeing demons, go to the mountains.
— Jeffrey Rasley, Bringing Progress to Paradise: What I Got from Giving to a Mountain Village in Nepal
So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.
— Elbert Hubbard, Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book
Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.
— Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.
— Stephen King
In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.
— John Grogan, Bad Dogs Have More Fun: Selected Writings on Family, Animals, and Life from The Philadelphia Inquirer
They had buried him under our elm tree, they said -- yet this was not totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.
— Willie Morris, My Dog Skip
I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.
— Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life
Whatever it takes to break your heart and wake you up is grace.
— Mark Matousek, Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story
Your heart is the size of your fist; keep loving, keep fighting.
— Ariel Gore, Atlas of the Human Heart
In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!
— Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.
— Michael J. Fox, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist
Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey.
— Hyeonseo Lee
You are putting yourself in serious danger...'I think that I preferred to put myself in serious danger rather than confront my shame. My shame at not having become someone, the shame of not having made my parents proud after all the sacrifices they had made for me. The shame of having become a mediocre nihilist.
— Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
Fact: upon locking yourself our of your apartment you will immediately need to use the bathroom. Fact: and then you will stand in place and watch your door. You will just stare. As though rebuffed by it. As though it has done this to you.
— Augusten Burroughs, Possible Side Effects
The greatest challenge of my life has been to see and accept the actual truth without great pain and struggle against it.
— M.C. Halliday, I Came Up Stairs: A Victorian Courtesan's Memoirs, 1867 to 1871
The morning opens, a mist of innocence appears across the countryside that tells each one of us the day is new. That feeling of hope, love and the humble awareness of our duty becomes clear if even for a moment. It is that experience of inspiration that follows us into a small town woken by a cool frost on this Sunday morning and the laughter of children playing.
— Kris Courtney, Norma Jean's Sun
… that sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania, that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek each other out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel each other, lay a hand on a shoulder or an arm round a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collude, be right, take offence, apologise, make amends, avoid each other, and seek each other’s company again.
— Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness
For the first time I realized adults could back themselves into corners so remote that love, or its memory, could no longer reach them.
— Kirby Wright, Moloka'i Nui Ahina: Summers on the Lonely Isle
You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you strayed off course, to the edge of the known world.
— Anne Roiphe, Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason
A marriage, willy-nilly, requires you to trust that your spouse will tell your story truthfully and lovingly when you are no longer around to tell it yourself.
— Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me: A True Story
As an adult, getting paid thousands of dollars a week to say, “Aye, Sir. Course laid in” is a seriously sweet gig, but when I was a teenager, it sucked.
— Wil Wheaton, Just a Geek: Unflinchingly honest tales of the search for life, love, and fulfillment beyond the Starship Enterprise
God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.
— Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense
You know Becky, you haven't been the same since that crowbar fell on your head." - spoken by my mother after I eloped with a guy I'd known for about a month, when I was 18 years old!
— Becky Lewellen Povich, From Pigtails to Chin Hairs: A Memoir & More
I like it here. I like the girls, and I like the DJ's, and the cocktail waitresses, and the loud rock'n'roll (though I would happily beat everyone in Poison to death with the severed limbs of the members of Warrant).
— Craig Machen, Still Life With Brass Pole
We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.
— Mary Karr, Lit
I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much.
— Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
Oh my!! How you've grown. Soon you'll be catching the Lord's balls.
— Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
...if that energy could have been channelled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.
— Michael Herr
Had I glimpsed just a little of the suffering I would witness and the heartbreak I would endure, I would have fled in the other direction...But I could not foresee any of these things...And many years later, with tears in my eyes, I remembered my decision to follow this God no matter what the cost.
— Daniel Walker, God in a Brothel: An Undercover Journey Into Sex Trafficking and Rescue
...I really did "choose" to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven't chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.
— Jennifer Finney Boylan, She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders
Just because you can, doesn't necessarily mean that you should!
— Bill Collins
If you can see it, you can achieve it. God helps those who helps themselves. Power is in the act of humility.
— Patricia Amis
I am a product of two worlds and each world has given me a reason to love, be kind and grow strong.
— Shilpa Raj, The Elephant Chaser's Daughter
There's nothing gay about living life straight
— Paul B. Tripp, Choking On Silence
Just because you can, doesn't necessarily mean that you sh
— Bill Collins
When I first met Billy I thought about sucking his eyes right out of their sockets. They’re like turquoise gum drops.
— Jo Treggiari, Love You Like Suicide
I try to walk around without being noticed but I can’t help attracting attention with my pink Mohawk, black clothing and steel toes, and often I’m with Holly and we’re both tall and arrogant.
— Jo Treggiari, Love You Like Suicide
A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.
— Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier
I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.
— Darin Strauss, Half a Life
...We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned withpot coffin or ceremony, our hasty untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.
— Ghada Karmi, In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story
If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it?
— S. Kelley Harrell
I write so that my handful of pebbles, cast daily into still waters, will produce a ripple. 
— Anne Schroeder
Love was a verb with a certain amount of energy attached to it - a daily quota - and you had to choose on whom you wanted to spend this energy. That was love. That was why people had to pray for it. If it were not finite, no one would pine for love in their lives - they would just wait to receive or learn to give.
— Alice Pung, Her Father's Daughter
Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us to little more than animals, humanity in the shape of our saintly medical officers triumphed over barbarism.Remember, while it always seems darkest before the dawn, perseverance pays off and the good times will return.
— Alistair Urquhart, The Forgotten Highlander: My Incredible Story of Survival During the War in the Far East
Love was like notches on a speaker that could be cranked up and down, the decibels of desire, the frequencies of feeling. Sometimes she thought that she might have cranked it all the way up and broken the dial before the music had even started.
— Alice Pung, Her Father's Daughter
He had not even the self-complacency that enables stupid people to accept their mediocrity with unction
—  he had on the contrary an engaging modesty.
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.
— Raul Ramos y Sanchez
Who have you helped today"?
— V.
The memoirs of call girls are much in demand these days - a millennial craze.
— Dimitra Ekmektsis, Confessions of a High-Priced Call Girl: Second Edition
There is a cost to loving anything, or anyone. No one tells you that when you are young.
— Shuly Xóchitl Cawood, The Going and Goodbye: A Memoir
Disney will never make a movie about my life story, and that's a shame--I'd make a really cute animated creature.
— Kate Bornstein, A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She is Today
The clown was an evil one. They’re either good or bad, and this one was definitely the latter.
— Chris Thrall, Eating Smoke: One Man's Descent Into Crystal Meth Psychosis in Hong Kong's Triad Heartland
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, Writing the Memoir
I was always an odd child, though I had no idea what odd was, really.
— Patti Larsen, Prince Nameless
To tell a tale so great as to tear the soul inside out"Sara Niles, Torn From the Inside Out
— Sara Niles, Torn From The Inside Out
...my sisters are tough. Our strength is in our laughter (Dan)
— Amanda Welch, The Kids Are All Right: A Memoir
I've had cancer twice and if I had to pick one fate for you, cancer or fertility problems-I'd pick cancer.
— Kelly Corrigan
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.
— Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003
She had always thought the word 'pheromones' made it sound as though molecules were floating in the air, shaped like little fluted horns, ready to attach themselves to the nearest target. Microscopic Edison phonographs flying about, their brassy mouths puckered to sucker onto bare unsuspecting skin. These were what he sent out to her. The pheromones. The eyeless babies of energy.
— Alice Pung, Her Father's Daughter
Betrayal is sacred when the heart can encompass the whole.
— Nancy Wait, The Nancy Who Drew
My mother taught me that an important word in any language is while. while one thing is happening so is another. While someone is in darkness another is in daylight.While person dies another is born.
— Margaret Leis HannaBrunhilde Maurer Barron   Barron, While... Born During WWII One Era Two Lives
The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story.
— Dorothy Gallagher
As the lights fade to a distant glow, I look back toward the city and imagine, somewhere in all of those lives, a little girl who is a lot like me. Maybe she rides in a car thinking about someone living far away from these lights and people. Even though our lives are separated by so much I wonder if she imagines the world through eyes like mine.
— Noriko Nakada, Through Eyes Like Mine
Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn't do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives. They have seen themselves in extreme circumstances and, in that, they have seen their own extremes.
— Fern Schumer Chapman, Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust: A Mother-Daughter Journey to Reclaim the Past
In 2005, my mad half, HER was born... ME & HER: a Memoir of Madness, 2012.
— Karen Tyrrell, Me and Her: a Memoir Of Madness
Now, through an act as simple as walking across a stage and collecting an empty plastic folder representing a degree, our stock had plummeted to nothing, the wretched leavings of some cosmic Ponzi scheme. A lifetime's worth of planning and training and delusion gone with the wind. Some of us were moving home to live free of charge in our parents' guest rooms, or if we were thin enough, heading west to try our luck in L.A.; others, to our collective horror, were being forced to work at actual jobs.
— Rachel Shukert, Everything Is Going to Be Great: An Underfunded and Overexposed European Grand Tour
Ignore the misery. Custom invites you to ignore the misery."SHOW YOUR TONGUE
— Günter Grass
This is a work of memory -- facts have been altered. Names have been changed.
— Lavinia Greenlaw, The Importance of Music to Girls
Sometimes I feel she hasn't left...especially when I wear the photo charm necklace with her picture in it. I can't tell you how many young men have stared into that picture and the reaction is always the same: a slow beam rises across their faces and they want to know all about her. They become entranced the way Dana Andrews did when he first saw Gene Tierney's portrait in "Laura." I know Maria finds all of this quite amusing; why shouldn't she? 'Laura' is her middle name.
— Pamela Palmer Mutino, Swish: Maria in the Mourning
Murphy's law inverted: What can go right, will go right. (Works if you're an optimist.)
— Saloma Miller Furlong
To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever serve that they should have ben born.
— W. Somerset Maugham
I recount as this journey begins where I rest to gather the tale from thissame old house resting on the hill, leaving me a view of a carnival once seen from just across the tracks. My pallet is dry now. The colors I see no more. The rain has washed away many of the signs that once stood for a prosperhome and family. My grave is waiting. The dreams once filled my head withimages of world unison, hope and companionship for all. The saga spokenthrough my canvas drew darker as the years went on to the bitter cold nights.All that comes to me now are glimpses of faces that graced my soul.
— Kris Courtney, Norma Jean's Sun
I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul.
— Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave
Murphy's law inverted: What can go right, will go right.
— Saloma Miller Furlong, Why I Left the Amish
I just want to see places – something inside me just makes me keep moving.
— Jackie Sarah Parry, Of Foreign Build: From Corporate Girl to Sea-Gypsy Woman
Looking back on the eruption, asking God why I had somehow been chosen to be afflicted with this damn disease, the fairer question would have been, “Why not me?” Why should I have been exempted from holding the proverbial short straw?
— Ken Cruickshank
My mother was everything to me…and then I got married…and my husband became everything to me. It struck me then… Regret was a wasted emotion… Guilt was even worse. But who can escape these destructive feelings? Who can pretend they didn’t exist?
— Cécile Rischmann, Somewhere Over The Rainbow: A bittersweet memoir
A garden is never finished. In that sense it is like the human world and all human undertakings.
— Karel Čapek, The Gardener's Year
He clenched his small fist, bellowed his rage to the heavens, and resolved to never again recognize the authority of any man on earth.
— Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: A Memoir
We are not defined by what knocks us down - we are defined by how e get back up
— Madeleine Black, Unbroken: One Woman's Journey to Rebuild a Life Shattered by Violence. A True Story of Survival and Hope
I opened the curtain and entered the confessional, a dark wooden booth built into the side wall of the church. As I knelt on the small worn bench, I could hear a boy's halting confession through the wall, his prescribed penance inaudible as the panel slid open on my side and the priest directed his attention to me."Yes, my child," he inquired softly. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my First Confession." "Yes, my child, and what sins have you committed?" ...."I talked in church twenty times, I disobeyed my mother five times, I wished harm to others several times, I told a fib three times, I talked back to my teacher twice." I held my breath. "And to whom did you wish harm?" My scheme had failed. He had picked out the one group of sins that most troubled me. Speaking as softly as I could, I made my admission. "I wished harm to Allie Reynolds." "The Yankee pitcher?" he asked, surprise and concern in his voice. "And how did you wish to harm him?" "I wanted him to break his arm." "And how often did you make this wish?" "Every night," I admitted, "before going to bed, in my prayers." "And were there others?" "Oh, yes," I admitted. "I wished that Robin Roberts of the Phillies would fall down the steps of his stoop, and that Richie Ashburn would break his hand." "Is there anything else?" "Yes, I wished that Enos Slaughter of the Cards would break his ankle, that Phil Rizzuto of the Yanks would fracture a rib, and that Alvin Dark of the Giants would hurt his knee." But, I hastened to add, "I wished that all these injuries would go away once the baseball season ended." ..."Are there any other sins, my child?" "No, Father." "For your penance, say two Hail Mary's, three Our Fathers, and," he added with a chuckle, "say a special prayer for the Dodgers. ...
— Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wait Till Next Year
She asks to see my diploma, holds it in her hands and smiles, reads it out loud before handing it back to me, and I hold it tightly on my lap, this piece of paper, the proof they won't find me dead on a couch on my thirty-eighth birthday or in some basement bathtub with my eyes wide and lifeless or alone in the bed I slept in as a child with a Baggie of white powder under my mattress.
— Kenny Porpora, The Autumn Balloon
They say the truth will set you free, but what they neglect to mention is what happens when the truth isn't what you want to hear.
— Connor Franta, Note to Self
Love each other or perish
— Mitch Album
I am not here to make you feel better, I am just here to make you feel worse
— Courtney Love, Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love
We are living in an artificial world—a world of fantasies and illusions. We've learned beautiful phrases but haven't learned yet how to carry out that little bit that we know. Our brains are stuffed with quotations, while at the same time nine out of ten of these dogmas are incomprehensible, murky, or lies. Which are worthwhile and which are not? Yes, I must stop being false before others and myself. How simple it all seems! But how do I do this? Let just a little time pass, and then we may understand—only the simplest, honorable acts determine the value of a man. Only I myself can and must help myself to become an adult.
— Boris Gorbachevsky, Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier's War on the Eastern Front, 1942-1945
Tomorrow is promised to no one so live your life fully everyday.
— Therese Crutcher-Marin, Watching Their Dance: Three Sisters, a Genetic Disease and Marrying into a Family At Risk for Huntington's
I'm just scared I won't run as fast as I did my freshman year,' I admitted, choking back tears.Coach Woj looked at me for a moment, his eye gentle.'You don't have to.
— Rachael Rose Steil, Running in Silence: My Drive for Perfection and the Eating Disorder That Fed It
I held the cardboard and felt its scissor-cut edge. And for the first time I understood the shape of my grief. I could feel exactly how big it was. It was the strangest feeling, like holding something the size of a mountain in my arms. You have to be patient, he had said. If you want to see something very much, you just have to be patient and wait. There was no patience in my waiting, but time had passed all the same, and worked its careful magic. And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love.
— Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
Even now, I am anxious about the naked thoughts that I have shared. The observations are blisteringly honest and of course they have to be.
— John Conrad, Among the Walking Wounded: Soldiers, Survival, and PTSD
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 cohering the dimensions of a person’s emic and etic thoughts and a linked series of memorable events into a unified personal ideology how to live a purposeful life. In cultural anthropology, the emic approach focuses on what people of a local culture think and how they interpret events whereas the etic approach takes a more objective view of how an outsider evaluates the behavior and customs of a culture. Usage of both emic and etic analysis provides the richest description of a cultural or a society in which the personal essayist operates within.
— 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
Writing the story of their own life allows the author to parse their story into examinable segments while continuing to engage in the act of communion and creation.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
In two months, I think, my college job will end. In two months I will have no office, no college, no salary, no home. Everything will be different. But, I think, everything already is. When Alice dropped down the rabbit-hole into Wonderland she fell so slowly she could take things from the cupboards and bookshelves on the walls, look curiously at the maps and pictures that passed her by. In my three years as a Cambridge Fellow there’d been lectures and libraries and college meetings, supervisions, admissions interviews, late nights of paper-writing and essay-marking, and other things soaked in Cantabrian glamour: eating pheasant by candlelight at High Table while snow dashed itself in flurries against the leaded glass and carols were sung and the port was passed and the silver glittered upon dark-polished refectory tables. Now, standing on a cricket pitch with a hawk on my hand, I knew I had always been falling as I moved past these things. I could reach out and touch them, pick them off their shelves and replace them, but they were not mine. Not really ever mine. Alice, falling, looked down to see where she was headed, but everything below her was darkness.
— Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
The downside is the fear.The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean.I hope you do for your sake.
— David Mitchell
In the beginning, I only wanted to know, love, and serve God and understand the Bible. What harm could that possibly bring?
— Charlene L. Edge, Undertow: My Escape from the Fundamentalism and Cult Control of The Way International
July 22, 2009At times I still feel lost, but I also feel the comfort of my Lord through the physical pain and the mental challenges. I know He’s there. I can feel Him in the sun beaming down on my brown skin. It feels like love and comfort. It feels like He’s holding me when I suffer and I’m not alone.
— Jacquelyn Nicole Davis, Trace The Grace: A Memoir
The act of writing involves documenting and studiously examining interactions of all aspects of the self, the environment, and culture. Writing is an illustrious act of self-expression. Writing resembles a ‘coming of the age’ story because the ongoing process of defining a person’s personality and character is representative of the synergistic product of the continuous and cumulative interaction of an organic self with the world, the constant process of developing psychological, social, cognitive and ethical self.
— 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.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The ride back to Kathmandu was comfortable and relaxing. There were more overturned trucks (the gas-powered ones seem to tip the most often, I’m surprised there weren’t more explosions), goats being herded across the highway by ancient women, children playing games in traffic, private cars and buses alike pulling over in the most inconvenient places for a picnic or public bath, and best of all the suicidal overtaking maneuvers (or what we would call ‘passing’) by our bus and others while going downhill at incredible speeds or around hairpin turns uphill with absolutely no power left to actually get around the other vehicle.
— Jennifer S. Alderson, Notes of a Naive Traveler: Nepal and Thailand
There are no answers, only choices.
— Christine Mason Miller, Moving Water: A Memoir
Even now, every job I get, I worry that it will be my last. I think becoming a washed-up hag is sort of my destiny. So if you see a wrinkled old bitch wearing a tattered fur and chain-smoking in an off-Broadway back alley...that’s just me. Starting four years from now.
— Anna Kendrick, Scrappy Little Nobody
The shape of your life depends upon whether you choose to be the sculptor or the clay.
— Pamela M. Covington, A Day at the Fare: One Woman's Welfare Passage
We both knew what it was to hurt our bodies. It's a strange reason to bond with someone, but I think we both needed to feel understood, and, even though we couldn't love ourselves, we could love each other.
— Melissa C. Water, Lady Injury
I have referred to it as a gift--something for which others with this affliction have taken me to task. I was only speaking from my own experience, of course, but I stand partially corrected: if it is a gift, it's the gift that just keeps on taking.Coping with relentless assault and the accumulating damage is not easy. Nobody would ever choose to have this visited upon them. Still, this unexpected crisis forced a fundamental life decision: adopt a siege mentality--or embark upon a journey. Whatever it was--courage? acceptance? wisdom?--that finally allowed me to go down the second road (after spending a few disastrous years on the first) was unquestionably a gift--and absent this neurophysiological catastrophe, I would never have opened it, or been so profoundly enriched. That's why I consider myself a lucky man.
— Michael J. Fox, Lucky Man
I know that I'm crazy. And that has made all the difference." From: Furiously Happy: A funny book about horrible things.
— Jenny Lawson
...A secure future seemed mapped out for me. Too secure, too mapped out. If I carried on in medicine, I realized I'd have a pretty good idea exactly what I'd be doing ten, twenty and even thirty years from that moment. It struck me like a halibut from the North Sea that that was not the way my life should go at all. What was the point of working on through the age of sixty-five and taking a chance on a better reincarnation next time?
— Graham Chapman, A Liar's Autobiography: Volume VI
Writers live twice. They go along with their regular life, are as fas as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there's another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives every second at a time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and details.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
We are spiritual beings having a human experience. We don't choose the experience but we do choose how we react to the experience we have. Choose to be positive, choose to be helpful, choose to be happy.
— Paula Coffer, Sandbox to Sandbox
William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He’d appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway.
— Patti Smith, Just Kids
In a funny way it's almost fun, having everything be so fucked up and managing to adjust. I guess you might say I'm proud. Proud of me, proud of my friends for managing to deal with this thing so well. For most people this would be the end of the world. They'd panic, their friends would panic. Things would get trampled in the stampede. But we've kept our heads, made the necessary allowances, ad can just ride this thing out.I'm pretty much just putting in time waiting for this cloud to blow over. Waiting for something to come along to make some sense out of all this. Killing time, waiting for some sort of cavalry to come over the hill. There's really not an awful lot I can do but wait. As long as there's no panic, we can hold out for damn near forever.
— Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity
Only when we feel the story in each of its moments or places are we able to tell it properly.
— Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey
Always remember that your memoir is never about you. It's about your reader. At it's core, it's about that shared space where we all experience the timeless truths of what it means to be human.
— Jerry  Payne, Writing Memoir: The Practical Guide to Writing and Publishing the Story of Your Life
I think, generally speaking, that children have a knack for picking up curse words. Having said that, my brother and I (although admittedly, it was I who displayed a higher level of fluency) took to cursing like frogs take to jumping. Mind you, we received excellent tutoring along the way.
— J.P. Sexton, The Big Yank: Memoir of a Boy Growing Up Irish
It was October in Pennsylvania and on the first morning the ground was frosted. As I walked to breakfast, some guy yelled out, ‘Thirteen inches in the Poconos.’‘Is that I porn film?’ I asked.
— George Hodgman, Bettyville
That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand.
— Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War
Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pasturage when we saw a small barefoot boy racing along the hot road with terror in his face. My father just managed to stop him. Though incoherent with fear, the boy managed to inform us that his little brother had just drowned in the horse trough. My father grabbed the boy and we went racing up to the farmhouse, where the anguished mother, the drowned child in her arms, was sobbing, crying out in German, and rocking in a rocking chair. Fortunately the boy was not quite dead. My father managed to get him away from his mother long enough to stretch him out on the porch and squeeze the water out of him. In a while the boy began to belch dirty fluids and then to breathe again. The crisis past, we went on home. The graceful German mother brought my father jars of her best sauerkraut for many, many years.
— Larry McMurtry, Roads : Driving America's Great Highways
Writing, too, is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you wrote, it pours out of you. If you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don't only listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck. Listening is receptivity. The deeper you can listen, the better you can write. You can take in the way things are without judgment, and the next day you can write the truth about the way things are."...If you can capture the way things are that's all the poetry you ever need.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
What crannies of untouched perception can you explore? What autumn was it that moon entered your life? When was it that you picked blueberries at their quintessential moment? How long did you wait for your first true bike? Who were your angels? What are you thinking of? Not thinking of? Writing can give you confidence, can train you to wake up.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
I wish I had another chance to write that school composition, 'What I Did Last Summer.' When I wrote it in fifth grade, I was scared and just recorded: 'It was interesting. It was nice. My summer was fun.' I snuck through with a B grade. But I still wondered, How do you really do that? Now it is obvious. You tell the truth and you depict it in detail: 'My mother dyed her hair red and polished her toenails silver. I was mad for Parcheesi and running the sprinkler catching beetles in a mason jar and feeding them grass. My father sat at the kitchen table a lot staring straight ahead, never talking, a Budweiser in his hand.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
Don't read their rubbish... Read mine ☺️
— Jacqueline  Creek, The Girl with the Emerald Brooch: Growing up: 1954 - 1965
It is winter, and very cold. There are icicles against the glass, and frost. I am tracing a pattern, before it melts. Before it fades, and is lost for good, like memories
— Suzy  Davies, Johari's Window
Writing about oneself is an egotistical adventure unless the act of self-exploration revolves around the distinct goal of heightening a person’s cache of knowledge, ideas, and level of self-awareness.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
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, Dead Toad Scrolls
Change is still resented on the Plains, so much so much so that many small-town people cling to the dangerous notion that while the world outside may change drastically, their town does not...... when myth dictates that the town has not really changed, ways of adapting to new social and economic conditions are rejected: not vigorously, but with a strangely resolute inertia...Combatting inertia in a town such as Lemmon can seem like raising the dead. It is painful to watch intelligent business people who are dedicated to the welfare of the town spend most of their energy combatting those more set in their ways. Community spirit can still work wonders here - people raised over $500,000 in the hard times of the late 1980s to keep the Lemmon nursing home open...By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...More than ever, I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.
— Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...
— Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
More than ever, I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.
— Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
I want to sling a stone, a small rock into a pool, see it ripple. I want to shake a tree, create a small storm..
— Suzy  Davies, Johari's Window
The landscape is bathed in the honeyed light of morning. Sometimes the memory of winter comes again. And my days are colored reveries of you, my nights sensuous
— Suzy  Davies
On his departure, he glanced swiftly back as he passed the furtive gaze of the gloved footmen.He was swept away in the momentum of shimmering glass....I had seen how the world turned, and I was beginning to feel my own power
— Suzy  Davies, Johari's Window
His lone withdrawing figure blended anonymously with the darkness, Dr Raven's quick, light steps becoming gradually distant, drowned out by the clicking staccato rush of trains, the steady drip of rainwater, and the clock of a nearby church as it heralded the hour
— Suzy  Davies, Johari's Window
I was an unwilling passenger leaving the Big Country. I would miss the mountains and the waterfalls,the treks on broad horses' backs to hidden villages in secret valleys.
— Suzy  Davies, Johari's Window
Writing is...creating tattoos which are invisible, under your skin
— Suzy  Davies
Our eyes met. I kissed her soft face, and down the stairs they descended. Their voices blended into an echo, a murmur. I ventured barefoot into the bedroom. The dark gown lay crumpled upon the bed
— Suzy  Davies, Johari's Window
Language makes us human
—  the heart knows. Memories abide in the body. They live on in the walls of our houses and in our objects. They are the sentiments which endure and sustain us in the infinite chambers of our hearts. Our hearts remember. Our hearts have this language. Our hearts sing.
There were women who navigated in canoes, holding their children, the beguiling wind blowing soft sleet kisses, raining upon their skins
— Suzy  Davies, Johari's Window
I wonder who else in the world was having such an exquisite dawn.
— Hope Jahren, Lab Girl
The piper never knew we were watchers.....Sounds echoed - sounds of a Scottish love song. They echoed through the silence, soft and melancholy, as he kept time with his foot, and the metal of the bagpipes glinted, through faint moonshine, and lifting fog
— Suzy  Davies, Johari's Window
The sun came out, warm on my back through my white school blouse.the streets were familiar, past the old tannery, the Jet garage. Past the Asian corner shop with rainbow jars of Kayli, gobstoppers and sherbert love hearts. I was in love with Frankie.
— Suzy  Davies, Johari's Window
She hands me an ornament of The Virgin Mary. "Pray to the Holy Mary, Mother of God!" I notice she has a gold chain round her neck. It has the holy cross and a shamrock
— Suzy  Davies, Johari's Window
I was climbing high, high up Pen Dinas Head among the sparkling yellow gorse, sea birds and white heather, with the oily sheep huddled together against the wind
— Suzy  Davies, Johari's Window
There are bald patches, like Daddy's head, on the pebble-dash, higher up than last year. I have picked off the stones. (I was a graffiti artist. No words, no pictures. The trace of identity marked in spaces.
— Suzy  Davies, Johari's Window
We must plant our dreams in real earth. We must dirty our hands. It's the only way. Whether we dream of planting flower gardens or churches, ever dream needs a place in which to take root and grow. Every dream needs a home.
— Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons
The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead.
— Mary Karr, Lit
Joy, it is, which I’ve never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self – delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving.
— Mary Karr, Lit
You don't need everyone to like you, just the right one(s)!
— LaTonya "Tee" Johnson
In the meantime, Mary's mother continued to stock her daughter's 'bottom drawer' which she started when Mary was only five years old.  When we got engaged the 'drawer' was already well stocked but by the time we got married it was more like a well-endowed wardrobe. 
— John L. Fear, Exclusive Pedigree: My life in and out of the Brethren