Essayist Quotes

“Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.”
― Agnes Repplier, Essays in idleness

“Canceled checks will be to future historians and cultural anthropologists what the Dead Sea Scrolls and hieroglyphics are to us.”
― Brent Staples

“Everybody we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage, and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full rencontre front to front with his fellow?”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays on Manners, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Nature, Friendship

“Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), a Portuguese poet, writer, and philosopher said, ‘The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regrets over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The tug of self-destruction and the desire to defy mortality by creating an everlasting mark upon this world are uneasy acquaintances. The strident edginess behind a writer’s searchlight voice is a product of the natural tension that engenders when an apathetic writer believes death could arrive tonight. Stunned by fear of a hard deadline, the writer is jolted from their state of laziness and mental neglect that trolling inertia dampens their aptitude to love life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“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, Dead Toad Scrolls

“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

“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

“Some notable people turned to writing in order to examine their life, assign meaning to their experiences, and by doing so shared with other people a beautiful rendering of what it means to be human. Can I temper the blows of life by recognizing loose snippets of life as chapters in an unfurling story? Should I take into consideration that suffering births all meaningful things in life? Alternatively, is the ability to experience and communicate joy what makes human life wonderful? What connective thread ties me to the broadcloth of other people’s stories? Do other people share stitches of raveled threads of loneliness and despair? Do other people know a secret verse to living joylessly and splendidly that eludes me? Do other people share my most profound ache to love?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Later I will systemize my impossible subject, but for the moment I want to enjoy a tentative movement between its different chambers. I am not certain which are important and which are extraneous. Nor am I certain whether this topic is one that I have the strength to pursue.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, Figure It Out

“Writing acts as a means to blunt pain and defer death by encouraging a person to live in an alternative manner.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Similar to other people, I suffer from my own brand of neurosis – a functional mental and emotional disorder involving emotional distress, indecision, social awkwardness, and interpersonal maladjustment. Unlike other rational people, I also suffer from mental delusions. It is a risky gambit attempting to hold at bay a pressing pack of personal abnormalities and a hazardous stable of personal neuroses including obsessional conduct, and compulsive thoughts while simultaneously straddling the horizontal bars of rationality and irrationality.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A sundry of intimate encounters with the vibrant intellect of perceptive thinkers dissolves a recluse’s shroud of seclusion. Can I manufacture the needed first aid kit to arrest my internal hemorrhaging? Can I stave off my mental deterioration by exploring the written words of renowned authors? Can I map a course out of my present quandary by scouring the libraries brimming with the beautiful mind works of previous generations of eminent writers? Will diligent encounters with the incisive thoughts of outstanding essayist shred the indivisible bars shielding my indeterminate self and release me from of the monochrome cage of self-imposed isolation? Can respected writers’ perceptive soul-searching create a template for my inchoative thoughts spontaneously to mature?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“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

“Writing requires great skill, painstaking patience, and he ability to perceive and express observations in a unique manner.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The text of a person’s writing reveals flaws in their thinking patterns, imperfections in personal character, and lack of acumen and academic skills.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Stunning joys fill us with the vibrant sensation of living. Periods of unabated boredom punctuate our lives. Irremediable pain lacerates every person. Writing bluntly about life is not always a merciful proposition. Life hurts. Deliberately probing a person’s tender spots can inflict great pain upon the raw nerves of a jagged mind. A love-hate relationship exists in writing. While the act of writing, akin to any act of creation, binds us to this earth, the act of attacking the self, identical to any other act of destruction, threatens the survival of the person targeted to receive repeated piercings inflicted by a sharpen pen.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Editing a written text is a collaborative enterprise that commences with the other parties commenting up the author’s initial ideas and it can include technical assistance in correction of grammatical mistakes, misspellings, poorly structured sentences, vague or inconsistent statements, and correcting errors in citations. Editing is as much as an art form as writing a creative piece of literature. A good editor is a trusted person whom instructs the writer to speak plainly and unabashedly informs the writer when they write absolute gibberish. Perhaps the most successful relationship between a writer and an editor is the storied relationship shared by Thomas Wolfe and his renowned editor, Maxwell Perkins. By all accounts, the prodigiously talented and mercurial Wolfe was hypersensitive to criticism. Perkins provided Wolfe with constant reassurance and substantially trimmed the text of his books. Before Perkins commenced line editing and proofreading Wolfe’s bestselling autobiography Look Homeward, Angel,’ the original manuscript exceeded 1,100 pages. In a letter to Maxwell Perkins, Thomas Wolfe declared that his goal when writing “Look Homeward, Angel,” was “to loot my life clean, if possible of every memory which a buried life and the thousand faces of forgotten time could awaken and to weave it into a … densely woven web.” After looting my own dormant memories by delving into the amorphous events that caused me to lose faith in the world and assembling the largely formless mulch into a narrative manuscript of dubious length, I understand why a writer wishes to thank many people for their assistance, advice, and support in publishing a book.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Self-knowledge enables a person to grasp what future decisions will define their final formation. The human mind habitually hits the rewind button and replays past events. Can looking back over the rim of time and engaging in thoughtful criticism of the precursor events of my formative years be of any possible assistance to expose the indurate truth of factual reality? Can I employ the tools of memory and imagination along with the techniques of logos – reasoned discourse – to escape strife and pathos? Does it make sense to write the story of my life so that I can ascertain who I am? With these unsettling thoughts and these maieutic questions in mind, I began writing an enantiomorphism-like scroll. The crystal molecules that comprise this text construct a mirror that replicates the multiple dimensions of a risky adventure into self-psychology. I harbor no expectation regarding the outcome of this reflective venture. Regardless of the consequences, all I can do is follow the psychic flow generated by this writing enterprise. I do not know where this positional analysis will take me or how this psychodynamic field study will end. I am simply dedicating all remaining personal energy reserves to capitulating to a tornado-like process of self-study, a turbulent procedure with an unpredictable outcome. Perhaps something sensible will result from deploying a series of narrative personal essays to deconstruct the parasitic evolution of an egocentric self.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Writing my fleshy story consisted of examining the butchered offal of my carnivorous character. Flayed like the catch of the day, I scrutinized the ramified offscourings of my worm-ridden soul, a parasitic host to tumors of self-doubt and lesions of personal insecurities.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The mythic resonance gleaned from stories exploring the infinite permutations of the human condition saturates the universal stream of consciousness, creating an interlinked constellation of our imbued voices trilling the full range of human feeling and experience.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“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

“Embracing the possible immediacy of dying shocks a writer’s lethargic and disdainful mind to attention, and this enlivened mental state assists them explore the possibilities of living purposefully. Invigorated mental activity examines how a person can enjoy a more enchanting existence by devotedly working on self-improvement.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Trampled upon by an unruly hoard of life-altering tribulations, we subliminally search for a path leading to spiritual salvation. A scrupulous chart demarking the deliverance of one person onto the road of recovery hews a lifeline of inspiration for other people to grasp.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Destroying the prior emaciated doppelgänger image that I held of myself is merely the first step of creating a revised personal identity. Can I accomplish the dissolution of my disembodied self and determinedly recreate a mutable sense of personal identity out of the scalded remnants of a psyche inferno?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Will working impulsively in velvet-lined ravines under tonight’s harvest moon yield any hearty hale to conciliate the ambitious rumblings of tomorrow?”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Is absolute truth and existence the same – equivalent to each other? Alternatively, is truth and existence mutually exclusive?”
― Kilroy J Oldster

“I will use narrative writing to explore the past, analyze the present, and speculate upon the future. I will studiously attempt to slay my ego and re-write my sense of self into a benign creature that reflects the worthy character traits of a beloved tortoise.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“... here I draw attention to one very widespread controversial habit—disregard of an opponent’s motives. The key-word here is “objectively.” We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus, pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are “objectively” aiding the Nazis: and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once”
― George Orwell, As I Please: 1943-1945