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Famous Kilroy J. Oldster Quotes

“Each of us wages a private battle to thrive. Whenever a person fully immerses oneself in life’s aromatic flower garden of pleasures and encounters life’s warship of armor-plated rigors, they blend and bend to make reasonable accommodations for surviving. Scripted and unscripted encounters with superior militant forces bruise us mightily and eventually cut us to the core. Every person’s life contains a minefield of obstacles that function as potential barriers to achieving our ultimate manifestation. The expended labor of continuously hefting oneself over one contentious hurdle after another is what leads a conscientious person onto the path of needing to write in order to create emotional poultices to ameliorate painful wounds.”

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“Using pain medication protects us from feeling select infirmities. There is an extensive list of medications available to reduce or eliminate unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential physical damage as well as moderate depression and anxiety associated with chronic pain. A recognized danger of taking various pain diminishing medicines is that some pharmaceutical drugs prevent people from feeling ordinary symptoms of pain that would otherwise alert them to the existence of a medical condition that might be life threatening if not immediately treated. Sometimes we must not act to mask or dull pain but listen to the important message that pain sends us. Experiencing fundamental variations in our exterior world or undergoing a series of personal transformations can prove painful and life altering.”

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“Why does the world not rebel against a capitalistic society that places the right to pursue greed ahead of the collective good of a community? Why do so many people who live next door or across a hallway from one another never speak to their neighbors? Why do so many people go to great lengths to avoid interacting with their neighbors by installing tall privacy fences and timing their ingress and egress to avoid unscripted encounters with one another? In an age where electronic advances makes communicating with people a rapid convenience, why is it that we live as a species more isolated than ever before from people outside our immediate enclave?”

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“Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation”

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“General propositions – universal laws governing human thinking and human existence – leave room for many individualistic permutations. How shall I survive the specter of tomorrow, what is my life plan, and how will I come to terms with the finite lives of all humankind? How do I heal seeping internal wounds that lacerations weaken personal resolve? A person whom avoids seeking fame and fortune and engages in contemplative thought will enjoy a heightened state of existence. My survival hinges upon shedding the shackles of modern time’s economic rigors; seeking penance through heartfelt contrition; accepting a vision quest devoid of wanting; rejoicing in my budding curiosity; loving nature; giving breath to living without fear and apprehension; and eliminating any form of want or angst from my cerebral being. Unshackling myself from the burdens of the past – guilt, remorse, anger, and petty resentments – is part of the healing process. The other part of a rehabilitation prescription is declaring free rein to live in the present one moment at a time. After all, humankind is the only member of the animal kingdom that walks this earth with the foreknowledge of its ultimate demise, but why would any person allow information pertaining to our personal fate ruin a perfectly good walk in nature’s woodlands with our fellow creatures?”

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“Each person must choose their own version of reality by living in a manner that ensures personal survival, appeals to their innate intelligence, and corresponds with their virtuous life decisions. … Each person must ascertain the proper and natural way to lead his or her individual life. We live only once and seek to make our singular existence count by leaving a personalized mark upon the world by contributing to human happiness or advancement in knowledge or in the arts.”

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“We cannot anticipate in advance how anyone will respond when they first rub elbows with Eros’ malady of passion and madness. Eros arrives on a wing of a devious angel to take control of our body, encapsulate our mind, and seize command over the quality of our life. In its purest manifestation, romantic love guarantees to rip us asunder, because we are unwittingly dispossessed of our precious sense of self-control.”

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“An act of consciousness always adopts a point of view by classifying world happenings into favorable, unfavorable, or neutral categories. The consciousness is an observer, reporter, and responder to world events. Writers are perhaps the most conscious observers; they are constantly examining a continuous sequence of events transpiring in the temporal world and partitioning these occurrences into distinct cerebral units. When we read the works of an author, we ask ourselves what is the author’s pathos. When we tell our personal stories, we also adopt a point of view, and reveal our own melody of mental thoughts that describe the gravitonic center of the psyche.”

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“Good stories are thematic and thought provoking. Every story has a meaning to the teller; sometimes the actual meaning of the story is latent. Is storytelling evidence of how we go about taking measure of our action-filled lives? Do stories tell how we hunker down in a foxhole in an all-out effort to survive? Does storytelling also pay homage to how the mind is predisposed to roam about in a cloudbank while we are belly crawling on the battlefield of time? Does the sprawl of our stories delve into what cinematic themes we find worthy of living for and risk death chasing? What does the synecdoche of our stories tell us about people and how does this knowledge assist us fit into this diverse world as individuals? Do self-selected stories guide us in choosing how to go about life? Does the hard kernel of our personal story allow us to reconcile how we actually live with how other well-meaning people coached us to live? Do poignant stories of our generation tell us whether we should aim for a life of leisure, aspire to acquire wealth, pine to take pleasurable junkets, maneuver to climb the ladder of social prestige, altruistically give to charity, or stoically sacrifice personal delight in order to mollify a religious deity? What does the sanctified marrow of cherished stories tell us about life?”

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“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.”

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“Language is our identity tool and by using experience, observation, and imagination, we each discover the words that give voice to our lives. To tell our stories is the human method of perforating our isolation tanks, the means to encapsulate what we previously learned, and the mechanism that allows us to enter the universal dialogue of compassion. Sharing the pandemonium of our life’s stories full of grime, love, noise, and steeped in emotional chaos is the act that ultimately binds us to our family, friends, and community. All lovers know each other stories. Farmers, villagers, big city hobnobs, and the citizens from all nations share a conjoined thread through storytelling that seriously investigates the collective human condition.”

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“Unlike uplifting light fiction, narrative nonfiction’s trammeled territory provides no safe room where an unnerved writer can banish their unpleasant memories. Narrative nonfiction must make use of our sour feelings, pungent memories, gloomy thoughts, and other indigestible nougats of a black disposition. Given a choice between experiencing nothing and inconsolable grief, the writer will always take the epic grief that composes the grandeur of human tragedy. Without a mask of consolation to shunt the unseemly undercurrent that disturbs them, writers whom dabble in memoir or personal essay writing must swallow hard and make use of the entire range of their toxic temperament. The tonicity of narrative nonfiction need not be bleak, but it must be true to the full panoply of both positive and negative emotions that heave through the writer’s torrid veins.”

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“Art is not just a display of beauty. Art also reflects what is ugly, and it celebrates the grotesque. An artist frequently creates what we describe as beautiful by depicting what is at first glance unpleasing, peculiar, or abnormal and casting the unpleasant, strange, or outlandish images into a more agreeable light that reaches deeper truths.”

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“Humankind’s pathetic life supplies the poetry of our existence. Just as without tragedy comedy would lose its magical qualities, life without pain and absent knowledge of the inevitability of our death would result in our brief existence devoid of any note of sincerity and our lives ending without an apt punctuation mark.”

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“Critical personal writing enables the author to penetrate mental falsities that imprison him or her in fearfulness, bitterness, and jealously and encompass the reverential awe for the transcendental pathos of life, the small moments of happiness interspersed between stints of loneliness, sorrow, and hardship imbued in human life.”

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“Each act of writing represents a separate lock of the author’s tissue and all serious piecework folds into an ongoing anthology. A writer’s portfolio is comprised of interlocking ideas that are in a constant state of change. A writer’s ideas gradually reflect their current mental and spiritual composition and a writer’s way of living reflects the progression of their ideas. Each written version of a person’s life stands as mental testament of who the author was at a given moment in time. Just as we cannot sum up a person’s life with an isolated snapshot, truly to understand who a writer was we must read his or her entire body of work. No single work of writing tells us who the writer was. The compilation of a writer’s scripts defines the shady author, even if some of these works overtake, correct, or contradict previous efforts. Who we are is the summation of who we were as a child, teenager, young adult, in middle age, and as an elder. Only by viewing a person in successive stages do we truly comprehend them. Only by reading the oeuvre of an author, do we appreciate the writer’s ultimate act of creation. Only by reading a person’s obituary do we come to know what their living Magnus opus stood for.”

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“Artistic license, also known poetic license, narrative license, and licentiate poetical, is a colloquial term (employed occasionally as a euphemism), which denotes a license to distort the facts, alter the conventions of grammar or language, or reword pre-existing text by an artist in the name of art. Liberal usage of an artistic license to restructure basic facts can result because of conscious or unconscious acts. Artistic embellishment or misrepresentation of the facts and distortion or alteration of the compositional text frequently is the by-product of both intentional and unintentional additions and omissions. An artistic license, employed at an artist’s discretion to fill in details or gloss over factual and historical gaps, raises some ethical issues. Many stories retold verbatim would bore an audience or require inordinate time and resources to reenact, describe, and view. A dramatic license eliminates mundane details and tedious facts, spruces up the picturesque background, and glamorizes the characters’ temperament and action scenes. Is it wrong to be inventive with the facts? What degree of embroidery of a series of events and the characters’ mannerisms and attributes is acceptable? How can anyone paste together a set of facts into an interesting or compelling narrative that has literary value without engaging in some creative organization to enhance the theatrical retelling and to create juxtaposition of ideas and values?”

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“One of the most difficult decisions that any professional person will ever face is when to retire from their chosen field. Professional ballplayers occasionally hang on until their performance becomes pitiful. It is sad to witness a shell of a former athletic star humble themselves before a crowd. After attaining a level of proficiency through devotion of time and labor, the prospect of retiring from the field of competition creates a lifestyle crisis and frequently triggers depression when the retired professional suffers from diminished ego gratification. Astute professionals realize it is better to withdraw from competition before their diminishing level of performance becomes pitiable. False pride is contemptible because it can seduce a person to continue to remain in any field longer than pragmatic.”

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“Time passes regardless of how we use it; we grow old whether we act or procrastinate. A person who is unwilling to work to accomplishing worthy goals and who does not dream of performing great feats will always be mediocre. A courageous soul works conscientiously to accomplish personal goals that benefit other people. I aspire to find the audacity to create a self that I am not ashamed of being and live a humble and worthy life. The seer never wants for anything but an opportunity to learn and rejoice in life. Every day is a proper day to begin or continue a vision quest to attain insight.”

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“With endless pharmacological supplies at our fingertips, we do not need to penetrate the motives behind our actions, feelings, transgressions, dreams, and phobias. High on chemical substances we can remain stagnated in an infantile mental state. Without introspection, we foreclose ourselves from gaining the insight that allows us to navigate adulthood’s ceaseless demands.”

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“As we go through life, we essentially grow a personality. Our personality branches out in many directions to assist us organize our thoughts, feelings, values, ideas, and coping mechanisms. Our exhibited behavior – the way we organize and deal with life – becomes an external representation of our central self.”

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“All love is bittersweet. Love is inexplicable; it is part poetry and part masochism. Part of love is the loss of self-control because one must openly surrender their sense of an exclusive self to the manic powers of love. The personal act of surrender to a lover leaves one vulnerable to entanglement in a maze of emotions. When we fall in love, our lover’s happiness and well-being assumes the primary role in our mind, they become copilots of our souls. When we are in love for the first time, we feel what it means to become a complete person; we identify who we are by seeing our reflection in our lover’s eye; and we sense what we might become when infused with love. When our lover leaves us, we feel vexed and vacant because we recognize that they took up such a large part of what made us feel intoxicated with life. When our lover abandons us, we lose our sense of self; we temporarily cease to exist as a whole person, and we must reconstruct the shattered remnants of oneself in the wake of a love lost.”

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“A person whom fails to conquer oneself will always live in fear, and experiences life filled with conflict and emotional storms. Fearfulness prevents a person from perceiving reality and ever knowing oneself. Unable to cope with fear and uncertainty, a person resorts to denial, repression, compromise, and hides behind the mask of a false self.”

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“Confucius advised his disciples, ‘Wherever you go, go with all your heart.’ Giving all of oneself to an artistic effort is particularly apropos because even the most talented writer, poet, singer, painter, musician, or philosopher will tear a tatter from their soul in order to produce anything that will stand the test of time and affect the minds of other people. While I admittedly lack the talent, skill, poise, grace, intelligence, creativity, and persistence of esteemed writers, I share what every writer must, an awful craving to know what previously escaped me, to know thy self and my place in the world. An irrepressible hunger to know, searching for the truth that governs our being, is what makes us human.”

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“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.”

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“It is has been postulated that all the events in a person’s life parallel those of past and future civilizations. The sages tell us that there is no individual truth. There exists only universal truth. Cultures endowed the basic reality that speaks to us with many names. The ultimate truth might or might not be a singular Godhead per se, but rather the oneness that we intuitively seek to connect with comes without manifestation or form. Liberation from suffering is what ultimately leads to union with this oneness, a sought after state of consciousness beyond being and nonbeing, beyond tangibility or comprehension. Surrendering all earthly attachments, renouncing all desires, and relinquishing any form of being, represent the inaugural steps I should make in order to connect with the sense of oneness that I seek. All things, people, and events of this world – grass, plants, trees, rivers, oceans, sand, stones, birds, fish, animals, insects, birth, death, flood, fire, pestilence, war, saints, crooks, heroes, delusion, and enlightenment – are part of a sacred reality.”

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“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.”

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“All life depends upon the opportunistic interplay between elemental forces, the mysterious dualities of the numinous universe. Ying and yang forces of the natural world (lightness and darkness, fire and water, expansion and contraction) create tangible dualities that are complementary, interconnected, and independent. Without the firmament in the midst of the waters, without both sunshine and water, no life forms could subsist on this rocky orb. Without the rich soil surrounded by a canopy of an illimitable sky how could we feed ourselves, how could we breathe?”

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“A community of writers forges civilization. Future writers hold at their fingertips the psychic energy needed to propel us forward in the pursuit of universal justice. Writers’ meticulous observation of their surroundings spurs us to appreciate the impelling bouquets of beauty that rally us to declare the crispness of each day. Writers’ studious contemplation of their place in the world allows us to join them in admitting to the stochastic whimsy of a fateful life.”

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“We each sketch the story of our lives. We tell other people whom we have become by making decisions how we carry out our daily affairs, how we confront personal crisis, and when we extend comfort to other people. By talking about our secret dreams, we reveal who we hope to become. Writing changes us. A sentence on paper reflects not only who we now are, but it also exposes who we used to be.”

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“I commence the act of personal transformation by unreservedly accepting the inevitability of my death. When I thrust aside fear of death, I become a new person, I transmute into a reformed person who is unafraid. The fear of the unknown does not hold me down. Free from attachment to life allows me to embrace personal ugliness and admit to my decided paltriness. I am no longer ashamed of my personal deformities. I embrace my impermanence with a candid shrug of the shoulders and a slight nod of the head of that conveys utter indifference. Now unhampered by awareness of my transience, I can act by using this limited window in time to paint myself for how I, and only I, see fit.”

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“We each labor under our own brand of personal doubt that undercuts longed for equanimity. We diligently search for a lost language that tells us how to live with zest and joy. We seek to align ourselves with our sublime inner nature and mirror the divine wholesomeness of the matchless beauty of the natural world that surrounds us. We seek to devolve transcendent fluidity of the mind through the personal power of self-control, perception, and knowledge.”

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“An infusion of storytelling lifeblood of into the vein of time provides a means to stitch a common thread of conjoined understanding through the collective consciousness of our generation. The communal sheaves of internal dialogue handed-down through the ages trace a seamless patchwork of wisdom, weaving the broadcloth of perception with strands of evocative fabric gleaned from examining the textile breach of humankind’s fitful existence.”

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“Half way through life a thoughtful person must undertake an honest assessment of their life. I am now fifty years old. I am rapidly turning into a dry stalk, my breath is sour, and I am beginning to smell of the grave. I melancholy project that in all probability I have now existed about half the period of time that I shall remain in this sublunary world. Resembling the trajectory of other men reaching middle age, my upward ascent in life crested and now I am commencing the meteoric downhill descent. Distinct from Americas’ pioneers and other luminaries whom played an important role in expanding our knowledge and deepened our appreciation of nature, I have done nothing to advance the human condition. I have not mapped any new territory, contributed to the arts or sciences, or expanded our comprehension of mathematics or the natural sciences: astronomy, biology, chemistry, the Earth sciences, and physics. I did not contribute to medicine, cognitive science, behavioral science, social science, or the humanities. Unlike revered social leaders whom advocated peaceful relations with all people, I remained mute while domestic and international conflicts sundered communities. I created no historical existence; I exist only as an introspective being. I have not added one iota to the bank of knowledge of succeeding generations. I have not added any quarter of happiness to other people. My contribution to the human race is nil. In all probability, I will flame out without leaving a lasting trace of my mundane personal existence.”

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“My charter is to examine my egoistical self and alter my being by placing on paper whatever rests inside of me. I seek to develop a cohesive philosophy for living – and for dying – that is spiritually nourishing by dichotomizing the events in life that formed me. I aspire to discover an authentic core that will guide me through a physical world where human thoughts and deeds deepen our lives. Just as a flower must bud, every person feels in his or her marrow the need to express what it means to be human. Unlike a flower, which we perceive as a singular iridescent unit of material reality, we tend to perceive oneself as containing interlacement of multitudes, an array of interlaced voices.”

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“I seek to ascertain a way to breathe life back into my sunken chamber. I need to discover an incarnate means to replicate the meditative shadow that appears on the wall of my inner cave. I must eliminate the distorted manner that I look at the world through the falsifying mirrors of illusion and delusion. My innermost fear is that I wasted precious time, squandered opportunities, and the clock will expire before I create any worthy testament to the pristine beauty of nature or innate goodness of humankind. I shudder in the creeping shadows of the evening struck by the thought that I lack the discipline, talent, and fortitude as well as the crucial gift of evaluation and analysis demanded to add to the collective good. I fear that selfishly ensconced in a cosseted life I ignored the shaft of light that openly beckons each of us to unbolt. I am clueless of how to release the glorious expression of beauty that our nature seeks to burnish in our fleeting ambulation across the plains of time. Do I dare pull back the curtain and unmask the timid man that stands hidden behind the sheltering layers of untruth that conceal the demesne of his mangled personal thoughts, feelings, emotions, wants, and needs? Inside this crusted urn, is there a shard of anything that can be cultivated for goodness, if only I possessed the strength of mind and insight to will it into fruition? Does one know how to share their modest notions with other people who might yearn to hear that they too are not alone?”

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“Finishing large projects can result in a mild or severe thud of depression. The scariest part about completing any demanding project is that irrespective of how exhausting the labor might be the work also arrests a person’s attention. Working passionately is akin to a person consenting to a kidnaping. A person engaged in performing a princely task feels whisked away on a captivating voyage of undetermined final destination. At times, I wondered if the only thing that actually kept me going is the work of crafting sentences. Writing sentences is contagious. Finishing a sentence infects a person with a desire to write another sentence. The feverish rash of writing spread until it consumed all my resources. Once I stop writing, I will need to find a new reason to awaken each day.”

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