Essayist Quotes

“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, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Personal essays are often nostalgia-fused narratives written by authors with authenticity fetishes.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Writing is a method to stanch a person’s deepest lacerations.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“(Stanley Kubrick) worked more like an essayist than a director.”
― Emilio D'Alessandro, Stanley Kubrick and Me: Thirty Years at His Side

“A personal essay is probably the most malleable form of writing style, because it enables a writer to engage in a felicitous conversation with oneself. The more formal rules that govern academic writing are largely inapplicable to personal essay writing. Personal essays are free from the forbidding cadence and rigid structure of thesis writing. A personal essay’s lilt reflects the movement of the writer’s mind.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“An essayist’s tone can be grim or playful, somber or teasing, and critical or uplifting. Unlike a thesis that a writer drafts to establish, verify, and support a proposition, a person primarily writes a personal essay to please oneself by questioning, probing, and investigating the mysterious, anomalous, and the unknowable wreckage of our humanity. A writer frequently initiates a personal essay by simply clearing their throat.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Writing at its foundation stone is the transmutation of personal experience into thought and weaving intricate patterns of thoughts into graphic scenes.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Writing is part of life, but it is not part of the ordinary busyness of life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“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, Dead Toad Scrolls

“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, Dead Toad Scrolls

“When writing a personal story of what it means to be alive, a person is simply replicating on paper the universal story that all human beings share.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“All art including essayistic writing is essentially historical. A writer paints a story with a palette drawn from the well of personal experience and the product of their dream works. A writer’s sense of empathy, philosophy, and accessibility springs from the writer’s clipboard of inchoate childhood experiences bookend with teenage and adulthood’s adventures, chores, mishaps, comedic events, and tragedies.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Writing reveals part of the author, customarily the fragment that the writer carefully chooses to hide from people closest to them. Writers place on paper their secret thoughts, cryptic opinions, enigmatic judgments, and uncensored criticisms of themselves.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A writer’s work product is the amalgamation of all the idiosyncratic components of the human mind including the lucid, cogent, and coherent, and the illogical, foolish, and absurd.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“No paper is ever finished to an author’s satisfaction. External circumstances and internal limitations conspire to terminate the work. The writer stops pounding out text and ceases tinkering with words when one comes to a point of diminishing returns and/or an urgent need to move forward forces an abandonment of the work.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Commencing and concluding any writing project entails making certain compromises. A person must put off attending to other projects in order to devote him or herself to taking on an extensive writing project. The allocation of a writer’s limited resources of time requires choosing how much time to devote to any manuscript. One must stop working on a manuscript before it meets all the writer’s hopeful expectations.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A writer always questions their primary motive to commence placing thoughts and recollections onto paper because many factors urge the writer to begin and an equal number rivaling factors implore them to quit.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Art consist of a writer or painter’s psychosis extirpated on the canvas of his choosing, a truism whether one is inspecting a Vincent Van Gogh masterpiece or deciphering the incomprehensible utterings and dissociated ramblings of one of the Philistines framed in the picaresque novel ‘Confederacy of Dunces, written by American novelist John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969).”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Educational personal experiences are seldom the result of efficient enterprises and pleasant occurrences. Personal growth does not entail doing what we find easy or financially profitable. What defines us is not exclusively our natural talent, but also our willingness to go outside ourselves to scramble, discern, locate, and acquire what is heretofore missing in our lives. A person who dares tread the ground that they most fear is an intrepid explorer regardless of the final economic result attained.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Writing is one method to discover ideas that a person previously never consciously considered.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“All methods of writing represent an intellectual technique of inquiry and expression. Both personal essay writing and poetry provide a reputable method of a person sharing their physical and emotional experiences, observations, and thoughts.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The agenda of consciousness behind any an act of creation is the desire to share.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The aesthetics of language is the ineluctable medium of thought that wends through the leas of prose and poetry, literature and philosophy. People who think are always analytical. Essays, literature, and poetry are analytical and philosophical. All philosophy is literary prose; all philosophy contains the poetry of thought.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Thoughts, words, and deeds – three types of intentional expressions – reflect the actions of people endowed with the components that define our essential humanity, namely consciousness, memory, and emotional indexes”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The study of philosophy represents an extended mediation on death. The study of literature teaches us that life is absurd, because humankind possesses the foreknowledge that we each owe a death. It is the poets, persons vested with divine inspiration, whom teach us how to live, by boldly experiencing and dutifully recording all the vibrant sensations of life.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The mongrelized gears of the human mind respond to both logical and emotional trigger points. Language acts as a sparkplug that ignites a dense network of mental synapses in the human mind. By the graciousness of nature, our active and synchronized mental workings effectively process both facts and feelings. In a gifted writer’s hand, the incantatory power of language reveals truth. A multiplex of word pictures educing sounds, scents, taste, and acts of touching enables the reader to comprehend the full panoply of historical facts. The tradition of using expressive and allusive language affords the reader with an opportunity to integrate for themselves the full emotional reveille of the symbiotic beats of connected events that trigger the interworks of an engaged mind.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Writers, similar to painters, use both darkness and lightness, to create a telling canvass sharing with future generations their struggles realizing the fundamental value of human existence. Duplicating the tried and true techniques of a portrait painter, I commence this portrayal of a deeply conflicted human being with a wash of black, because as Leonardo Da Vinci noted, nature shrouds all things in dark except as exposed by rays of light.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Writing temporarily arrests the relentless passage of time, but nothing can halt the propensity of passing days to bring change to the corporeal structure of human beings.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“An expedition searching for personal transformation commences with the first stroke of the pen, and continues thereafter one incisive word at a time.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Written thoughts have a short half-life. Writing is a matter of slaughter, “self-slaughter” as Shakespeare put it. Each sentence that I write is akin to dispensing a kernel of my prior life into a private sanatorium. Placing snippets of a previous self onto paper is analogous to building custom-made coffins to house a departed persona. By constructing and laying down sentence after sentence in a commemorative writing feast, I am cannibalistically consuming the flesh of my prior self. Furiously writing each carefully interlinked page, I am steadily burying the skeleton of my former self.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls