Autobiographical Quotes

“I learned to read at a young age and I have always read voraciously. It is one of the few things, aside from getting fucked up and getting in trouble, that I have done consistently throughout my entire life.”
― James Frey

“In a sense, the better you adapt to school the less your chances are of later adapting to the actual world. So I figure, the worse you adapt to school, the better you will be able to handle reality when you finally manage to get loose at last from school, if that ever happens. But I guess I have what in the military they call a 'poor attitude,' which means 'shape up or ship out.' I always elected to ship out.”
― Philip K. Dick

“বারোটার সময় দাঁড়ালাম পেতলের ঘণ্টাটার পাশে। ওই ঘণ্টার শব্দ গুণে আমি ইস্কুলে যাই। কতো মধ্যরাতে ঘুম ভেঙে শুনেছি ওই ঘণ্টার দিগন্তের রহস্যবিভোর ধ্বনি। একজন দারোয়ান একটা বড় মুগুর দিয়ে দুটো-দুটো ক'রে ঘা দিলো। পৃথিবীতে বারোটা বাজলো, দুপুর হলো। সময়কে সেদিন আমরা বাজতে দেখলাম।”
― হুমায়ুন আজাদ, ফুলের গন্ধে ঘুম আসে না

“পালাতে পারলেই তো শুধু পারা যায় বেঁচে থাকতে।”
― হুমায়ুন আজাদ, ফুলের গন্ধে ঘুম আসে না

“The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual's autobiography, on the basis of which a notion of identity can be reconstructed repeatedly, by partial activation in topologically organized sensory maps. ...
In brief, the endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizable part of the state of self as I understand it.
The second set of representations underlying the neural self consists of the primordial representations of an individual's body ... Of necessity, this encompasses background body states and emotional states. The collective representation of the body constitute the basis for a "concept" of self, much as a collection of representations of shape, size, color, texture, and taste can constitute the basis for the concept of orange.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“Beautiful day out there,” I said, perching on the stool and crossing my legs. “It’s autumn, Sunday, great weather, and crowded everywhere you go. Relaxing indoors like this is the best thing you can do on such a nice day. It’s exhausting to get into those crowds. And the air is bad. I mostly do laundry on Sundays—wash the stuff in the morning, hang it out on the roof of my dorm, take it in before the sun goes down, do a good job of ironing it. I don’t mind ironing at all. There’s a special satisfaction in making wrinkled things smooth. And I’m pretty good at it, too. Of course, I was lousy at it at first. I put creases in everything. After a month of practice, though, I knew what I was doing. So Sunday is my day for laundry and ironing. I couldn’t do it today, of course. Too bad: wasted a perfect laundry day.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Silence in the shell of a city, no baby crying, no car honking, no ambulance shrieking, no lovers moaning, no drunks throwing up in the alley, no lights, nothing but wind and rain and snow in its season and rust and a rattling of open doors and carcass smell. It was a possibility like a brain tumor or a scorpion bite.”
― Anne Roiphe, Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason

“Don't ask me, I'm British.”
― Bill Fairclough, Beyond Enkription

“There is no real communication with those we love most”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“To read, or not to read....that is the question!”
― Mary Weaver

“A pensive personal essay or any other form of narrative nonfiction presents a writer’s viewpoint either as a participant or as a meticulous observer. As a voluble eyewitness, the autobiographer serves as a historian. A writer’s comments will also reflect his view of society and prevailing cultural trends. Each writer whom bases a story on his or her personal feelings is unable to serve as an unbiased historian. Writing about personal feelings and documenting firsthand experiences does not require a person to divorce oneself from all prejudices, assumptions, and strained interpretations. Oftentimes what make reading someone’s journalistic writing enjoyable are their bold, cynical, and derisive opinions, colored by congenital biases, laced with ironic or sardonic commentary.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“We do not demand perfection in logic or absence of subjective thinking from any writer. We read about other people’s lives not because they possess the innate infallibility of judgment. We read other people’s life stories to understand the history of their peculiarities and partialities.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A reader can tell if a transcribed story is true because it must contains elements of joy, pain, goodness, and malevolent thoughts. In a true story, not everything fits precisely together; a fortuitous conspiracy of events does resolve all loose ends.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Personal essayists attempt to create stories out of their true-life events in order to interpret reality, that is, they attempt to use writing to escape a vapid reality where they remain fixated upon their private deprivations and personal deformities.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Death is like a broken jar that you re trying to fix over and over again but it s not doable at all because the people who pass away can t come back, but they taught us love, admiration and joy that will last forever in our hearts.”
― Ikrame Selkani, My Dear Ones... Underground

“Family love is so big and immense, and sometimes we do not know what we have till we lose it. There is a proverb which says: when you haven t what you like, you should like what you have .”
― Ikrame Selkani, My Dear Ones... Underground

“I would like to imagine my life next to you, having fun and laughing at so many things, discovering new places, new people, new cultures, well, doing these kind of things mutually, enjoy spending time together.”
― Ikrame Selkani, My Dear Ones... Underground

“This book and my work are a way of adding meaning and commitment to my life. It also honors the child inside myself who was never understood or accepted by me until my journey into myself began and continues".”
― Jean Steinfeld, Friday I Went to Therapy, Saturday I Went Crazy: Travels Through Health, to Insanity and Back Home

“It is better to be a has-been than a never-was”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“I was not born happy. As a child, my favourite hymn was :'Weary of earth and laden with my sin.' At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy, I had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of me to be almost unedurable. In adolescense, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“About the author: Sean Michael Norris believes that this book serves as a sort of autobiography. Despite the fact that this story is a fictional product of his imagination, he feels that it represents a true portrait of his experience — that it honestly depicts how a younger, more vulnerable version of himself saw the world. And if he’s right about that, then to read this book is to learn about its author at a deeper level than any list of biographical facts could ever enable you to reach.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“Narrative essay writing affords sufficient opportunity for the writer to collect data, organize information, rationally process a matrix of collected material, reduce the essence of experience to assigned territories, and by doing so logically quantify their personal existence. Essay writing is an apt form to catalogue discordant incidences and as such writing prose oftentimes calls for the essayist to draw hard and fast classifications and conclusions.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Essay writing is an act of rebellion against walking through life as an empty intellectual shell and as an emotional vacuum. Essayists attempt to bridge the gap between meaningful self-exploration and raising conscious awareness of the larger world that we occupy. Essayist need to understand, they seek to broker compromises with the past, and meld truths out of broken shards of their history.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster

“Personal storytelling is akin to taking a detailed accounting of our actions, deeds, thoughts, and impulses, a comprehensive listing of our acts of depravity and kindness, an exhaustive statement of being. Scrolling backward through our muddling, taking an incisive look inside our hard case craniums, we gather a vision of the desired future course of action for ourselves and simultaneously send out a glimmer of morning light for people who witness our life force stammering its series of dashed, interlinear lines across the infinite galaxies of time and space. Analogous to the impulsive death dance of a shooting star, our final spasmodic rattle illumines the unrelenting darkness of unbounded space for other stargazing voyagers to witnesses. By being a dash of light in a wash of darkness, we inspire other intrepid explorers.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“[my father] usually concealed his rages with unconvincing politeness to contain his sparse energy, an instinct I may have inherited”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“They seem to think I’m sort o juvenile delinquent, the result of an undesirable background. Give him a normal reliable theatrical home, and you’ll find he can behave as decently as anyone else.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“I have tried and I enjoy yoga. But if you tell me to try yoga, then I will have to fight you. You will win, but I might nip at your jugular with my sharp incisors first.”
― Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“Play Tupperware drums as often as you can!”
― Jana Gillham, The Art of Farewell

“I promise you that if somebody had caught me by the shoulder at that moment and said to me, ‘What is your greatest wish in life, little boy? What is your absolute ambition? To be a doctor? A fine musician? A painter? A writer? Or the Lord Chancellor?’ I would have answered without hesitation that my only ambition, my hope, my longing was to have a bike like that and to go whizzing down the hill with no hands on the handlebars. It would be fabulous. It made me tremble just to think about it.”
― Roald Dahl, Boy: Tales of Childhood

“God, save me and I will serve You as long as I live!”
― William Hermanns, The holocaust;: From a survivor of Verdun