Autobiography Quotes

all we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character--what we believe--none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!

~ Jess Walter

But you can't fault me on my footnotes. I've worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of putting footnotes in chapter 5, the autobiographical chapter, started out simply as a joke. Who but a biblical scholar would think of footnoting an autobiography? But the joke quickly got out of hand and become a significant part of that chapter. I plan someday to write a scholarly article consisting of a single sentence and a twenty-page footnote.

~ Jeffrey L. Staley

Happy 3rd anniversary Navigating Life's Roadways!This book is a charge and blessing from above. Writing it has been on my radar for a while.

~ Deborah L. Parker

Those is seek to profit from the torment of others will eventually pay the piper

~ Tony Alleyne

It was her smile that took me captive the day we met, and never once let me go. There was an authentic quality to her smile that made people stop and look; a basic human truth that seemed to emanate from deep within her and naturally find its way upward and out. Like the magma flow from Vesuvius, there was simply no stopping Cathy's smile. It could freeze people where they stood and hold them there, sometimes forever.That's what happened to me anyway.

~ Michael Spehn

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

~ W.h. Auden

Autobiographical writing stands as lasting memorial for enduring the travails of an earthly life. Writing is an apt technique to score our storyline into the annuals of time. To endure a mortal life is merely a transitory experience whereas writing about how one lived is an internalized exposition of what it means to be human. Writing is an external exhibition injecting the author into the world’s consciousness.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Human souls enfold the elemental elements that we configure to provide our own distinctive explanation of what it means to be alive. By opening our hearts and minds, by engaging in intuitive self-exploration, by telling our life stories full of prejudices and mindboggling idiosyncrasies, and by listening to the multivariate stories of our brethren, we add a ray of light to the spiraling consciousness of humankind.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Telling our personal story reveals the shape shifting landscape of our mind.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Storytelling entails weaving a narrative out of the disturbing, strange, inspirational, and unremarkable detritus of life. By picking among the litter of our personal experiences to select evocative anecdotes to weave into a narrative format, we reveal which of life’s legendary offerings prove the most sublime to us. Acts of omission are momentous. Our narration of personal sketches divulge what factoids inspire us or do not stir us into action, or contain obdurate truths that prove virtually impossible to crack.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

People naturally impose a narrative story-line upon their experiences. Autobiographical writing allows a person to cast their experiences into a narrative thread and organize their thoughts based not upon conjecture but with applied reason.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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

The memoirs of call girls are much in demand these days - a millennial craze.

~ Dimitra Ekmektsis

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

I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul.

~ Joy Harjo

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

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

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

You are not yourself in autobiography. It is never going to be you, it is only words on a page. Memories are unreliable, so adding the magic of imagination will make your story come alive.

~ K.h. Rennie

Audrey Hepburn, as famous as she was, packed her own suitcases... I don’t know why that struck me, but it did. 'She has a servant’s heart,' I thought.

~ Gavin Macleod

The Grim Reaper isn't grim at all; he's a life-saver. He isn't grim because he isn't anything. . . . he is nothing. And nothing is a hell of a lot better than anything. So long, boys.

~ Jack Kerouac

Mary [Tyler Moore] was absolutely brilliant... She is a fabulous actress. She can do anything.

~ Gavin Macleod

If I can do it, anybody can do it. Willpower is strong! I believe that. You just have to have faith in yourself—and God—and make sure you know where your priorities stand.

~ Gavin Macleod

I loved him with a passion of which I had no idea I was capable. I loved him partly to defend him against the world and partly because I genuinely believed we were soul mates.

~ Clare Balding

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience.

~ Young

It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream — so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.

~ Bill Bryson

I feel like a little tug in a great storm. But I'm fastened to a great ship on ahead. It's going into port and can't lose its way.

~ Patricia St. John

Thos who rule the world get so little opportunity to run about and laugh and play in it.

~ Stephen Fry

...The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

~ Frederick Douglass

Love and respect are above any law

~ Uri Jerzy Nachimson

The poet gives his whole life such a voluntarily steep incline that it is impossible for it to exist in the vertical line of biography where we expect to meet it. It is not to be found under his own name and must be sought under those of others, in the biographical columns of his followers. The more self-contained the individuality from which the life derives, the more collective, without any figurative speaking, is its story.

~ Boris Pasternak

..my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn't understand me. The town he lived in and the town I lived in were not the same.

~ Bob Dylan

Have you ever really wanted to be able to do something, but you came across a roadblock of some kind?You have a difficult choice. I made that choice once and it changed my whole life, by giving me experiences I never would have had if I took the easy street and had not tried.

~ Deanie Humphrys-Dunne

In the pre-war era when itinerant home-remedy salesmen still wandered the country, they had a traditional patter for selling a potion that was supposed to be particularly effective in treating burns and cuts. A toad with four legs in front and six behind would be placed in a box with mirrors lining the four walls. The toad, amazed at its own appearance from every angle, would break into an oily sweat. This sweat would be collected and simmered for 3,721 days while being stirred with a willow branch. The result was the marvelous potion.When writing about myself, I feel something like that toad in the box.

~ Akira Kurosawa

A ball feels different off every player's racket-there are minute but concrete subtleties of force and spin. Now, hitting with her (Steffi Graf), I feel her subtleties. It's like touching her, though we're forty feet apart. Every forehand is foreplay.

~ Andre Agassi

I was awarded 'Most Aggressive Rider of the Day', generally given to the most spectacular loser of the day.

~ David Millar

I just want to this about that.

~ Steven C. Smith

Opportunities may come along for you to convert something -something that exists into something that didn't yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain. It's not like you see songs approaching and invite them in. It's not that easy. You want to write songs that are bigger than life. You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen. You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular.

~ Bob Dylan

Fear is the primary tool of the mafiya. It's how they contain their vast criminal enterprise. For the mafiya, fear is the grease in the wheel. Fear is much stronger than love | Fear lasts much longer. Love fades and is replaced by hatred and contempt. Fear lingers and brings forth other emotions such as doubt. Fear encourages procrastination and cowardice. Besides, you always hurt the ones you love. Most are too afraid to hurt the ones they fear.

~ Gary Gunz Govich

Wanting to leave communist Russia is all fine and well | Actually leaving the country is where you might run into a few setbacks. Obtaining a visa for a simple vacation outside the soviet block was a long and arduous process. To immigrate to a free society was about as easy as finding whiskey in a church.

~ Gary Gunz Govich