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Dead Toad Scrolls

Book by Kilroy J. Oldster · 50 quotes · Memoir Writing, Memoir, Self Determination

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Dead Toad Scrolls Quotes

“A man who finds peace in the fume of his work is a man who knows himself and, therefore, knows what he must do. What is it that I would sacrifice myself to achieve? What is it that fills my lonely days and dowdy nights? What work consoles the soul? What action allows the brain to work at a fever, burn like an uncontrollable wildfire? What occupation, craft, or deed can I undertake that will embody a desire to share with other people my intellectual and emotional being? How does one express their worldly aspirations and spiritual yearnings?”

Purpose Driven LifePassionate LivingKnowledge Of SelfKnowing OneselfWork LifeKnow Thy SelfSelf Knowledge Work
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“The human mind demonstrates the ability to adapt to stress and stabilize our mental health. When our self-construal no longer supports our continual survival, we must purge ourselves of selective narrow-mindedness. We must eradicate operable mental prejudices in order to become more inclusive and mentally balanced. It is only through deliberate thought that we can radically eliminate ingrained predispositions and reconfigure who we think we are. A reconfigured self-construal is an act of mental health stabilization. By altering who we think we are, we can accept environmental conditions that previously proved too harsh for our self-identity concept to accept. In order to achieve mental and emotional equilibrium, the mutable human mind adjusts our sympathetic sense of self-identity.”

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“The agony of infinite despair and self-destructive emotions consumed my egocentric flesh and bones, while the furious flame of selfless love for the entire world purifies my sooty soul of all its grievous sins. I can now connect with the great silence of created beings and live in a peaceful manner that is impervious to external commotion of an inherently chaotic world.”

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“Humankind devotes much of its collective energy to managing personal and institutional anxiety and dealing with unsuccessful efforts of its civilians to cope with the tides of shifting social and economic conditions. Every city corridor houses downtrodden citizens whom have given up on life, the dopers, smoke hounds, crack heads, and unrepentant drunkards whom spend their days pushing shopping carts and their nights sleeping in gutters. In marked contrast to these filthy and wretched souls whom inhabit the skid row of every city’s streets, all animals display an admirable state of hygiene and a zest for life. Except for poor critters sentenced to live confined in a zoo and domestic animals held captives in deplorable harvesting pens, all animals live a carefree existence that is preferable to living off stress sandwiches of modern humankind.”

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“Every day is an opportunity to stand in awe when witnessing the overpowering presence of nature, an apt time to pay reverence for the inestimable beauty of life. I must remain mindful to live in an ethical manner by paying attention to the threat of injustice towards other people and resist capitulating to the absurdity of being a finite body born into infinite space and time. I am part of the world, a spar in a sacred composition, a body of energy suspended in the cosmos. I seek to create a poetic personal testament to life. When I pivot and turn away from fixating upon the cruel artifices of my encysted orbit to face and outwardly embrace the cleansing swirl of heaven’s windmill, I feel gusting in the shank of my marrow the thump of onrushing primordial truths, the electric flush of those ineffable couplets of life that one may not utter.”

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“Each of us is a massive composite figure. We are constantly filtering a barrage of sounds and visual images. Newspapers headlines scream to gain our attention. The radio blasts out its top forty. Billboards proclaim the newest film stars. Fashion magazines tell us how to dress and act. Each day sprouts its insider news tidbits. Each news day the media mashes another international or domestic crisis into our mental pulp and soufflés the macramé of political scandal or social untidiness into edible sound bites for us mentally to digest. Inside each of us resides shavings from this visual and electronic onslaught. An unseemly deluge of external stimuli shapes our ego formation.”

MediaWhite NoiseMedia QuotesMedia DistortionSociety InfluenceCultural InfluenceWebbMedia Diet
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“How can anyone sink into dejection and despondency when nature’s generous bounty is so magnificent that it makes any selfish feelings too frail to register? Who can despair their existence when standing before the mesmerizing power of an ocean, after witnessing a mother nurse a newborn stirring in their crib, or when held entranced by the life-giving gurgle of a river? Who can deny the miracle of life after watching fresh falling snow soundlessly adorn the mountains, vales, and fields in a saintly white cloud? Who can deny that a tree full of light shares the same holy strand of the indispensable nectar of life with the humblest creature that walks beneath its protective awning?”

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“Humankind’s insuppressible exuberance demands that we spring forward clicking our heels in revelry and delight when basking in the fullness of the miracle of life. Every day is a delightful gift. Walking in the dappled valley spackled in filtered sunlight of verdant woodland, we witness the diffused silhouette of humankind’s ambitious gestalt to make known the indeterminate, unravel the indecipherable, and joyfully flaunt the magical experience of living in the moment free of angst.”

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“Humans recognize the duality, autonomy, and latitude range of the mind and the body, and all humans comprehend their impending mortality. Unlike other animals, humankind knows despair brought about by understanding the inevitability of death of all living creatures. The radius of human thought touching upon the longitude of our transient existence causes infinite pain. Seeking to ameliorate existential anguish incites us to ponder spiritual matters, and this sphere of mental activity spurs us to contemplate the perimeter of unknown frontiers. Our ability to understand the compass of life and death allows us to view the circumference of the world as consisting of a past, a present, and a future in relation to our own lives. How a person views the range of their earthly life and how a person rationalizes their march towards a deathly outback creates a system of beliefs that separate people into classes, and the variations amongst class members’ belief systems supplements who we think we are.”

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“The powerful questions of life produce a dynamic dualism, which interplay creates the operatic structure that we must operate. Can the flesh and spirit coexist? Can inner despair and renewed optimism reside under the same roof? Can we harness humankind’s wretchedness in order to broker its salvation? Should all people seek out perfection or work to accept their fallibility? Should I eschew pain or embrace suffering? Do I cave into the meaningless of my life or actively rebel against the patent absurdity of human existence?”

Meaning Of LifeExistentialismPurpose Of LifeExistentialExistential CrisisExistential AngstSelf QuestioningLife QuestionsExistential AnguishQuestions Of Life
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“We cradle in our nucleus emotional ingots gathered through studied immersion of the incongruities of life. In an elusive quest to disinter meaning out of life, we must cull joy from our daily rituals while conscientiously striving to nourish the nucleus of our buried innate essence. By discovering inner peace blossoming amongst the rubble of daily life, while determinedly searching out the cytoplasm our innate essence, a person’s reveals their inspirational tranquility.”

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“A distinctive poetic atmosphere surrounds our autobiographical being. The culmination of our personal experiences projects an expressive emotional prism upon our faces, a self-projected limelight casting us with an aura-like quality that other people readily perceive and interpret. Each person’s life consists of nurturing his or her poetic seedlings. Introspection is the first and foremost means that people rely upon to grasp the referential nature of their essential personal experiences. Reflective moments allow us to enrich our understanding of life’s nuisances that imbue even our most rouge experiences with a personalized ambiance. The juxtaposition of life’s prosodic fragments with unanticipated moments of exhilaration provides the tension that composes the contrapuntal language driving the meter of our life’s story. The sweeping arch of our hand-tooled stories designates our chosen path and serves to remind us that even persons injured while attempting to discern the pathway to bliss can use their own brand of resourcefulness to rescue themselves.”

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“Most of us suffer from the pangs of self-doubt; yet, the courage to tread forward must originate from within. I seek to articulate a definitive purpose behind my effort and then resolve to devote all interpersonal resources to achieve established goals. I need to be mindful of personal talents and imperfections, boldly face all fears, bravely straddle the unknown, and unerringly establish high-minded objectives. I must exhibit determination, resilience, and courage to give my best effort and never slacken a resolute pace. A seeker is obligated to be truthful; I cannot engage in self-deception if I hope to develop the integrity of my spirit. Comparable to all worthwhile tests of character, a person seeking growth must ultimately conquer his or her insecurities and discover a means to muster flagging personal fortitude. Can I throttle back from the black lagoon or did I travel too far as a chainless soul up the river of insanity to turn back now? Can I reintegrate myself in a normative world where self-preservation and reasonableness reigns? Can I conduct a Black Ops reconnaissance operation by reconfiguring the organs of a dismembered self with reawakened astuteness, and exhibit the determined stoicism indicative of my ancestor lineage?”

FortitudePurpose Driven LifePurposeful LivingMemoir WritingSelf DoubtWriting MemoirSeekerSeeker Of TruthNal GrowthSelf Determinself Development
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“Occasionally we encounter a person whose personality is so effusive that they take over a room. They may not be the type of person everyone wants to resemble, but we enjoy watching them, and their presence uplifts us. An extrovert craves other people noticing and acknowledging their presence, they can never receive too much attention.”

PreciousOutgoingFlamboyantShow OffExtrovertPersonable And FriendlyPersonable
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“Any attorney with a conscience always speaks the truth. An attorney can and should practice law in a scrupulous manner, but some dishonest attorneys disregard ethical mandates in order to win. Unethical attorneys shape their clients stories, which is a fancy way of assisting them tell a fib.”

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“Novel ideas are unsettling, innovative concepts about important matters in human affairs is disruptive of the internal harmony that people prefer. There is a tendency even for the most logical and classically educated people steeped in rational scholastic traditions to assume that if any new hypothesis were correct, a scholar would already written it in a book.”

IdeasNew IdeasPerceptiveNew InsightsNew Interpretations
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“Running the gauntlet of the trials and tribulations of life, we accumulate an array of useful habits and self-defeating behavior. A personal routine that customary characteristics garner positive traits must be cultivated with care. We must ruthlessly discard the bad habits of yesterday along with any notion that one will appease a restless soul’s willful temperament with acceptance of any degree of personal slovenliness. Injecting new challenges into our lives can assist us recognize when we have allowed apathy and stale habits to dampen our spirit and dull our minds. Rejection of all forms of personal inadequacy and casting aside familiar tapestries opens our eyes to rediscover the unsullied sensation of living vigorously.”

Personal DevelopmentSelf DevelopmentHabitsPurposeful LivingSelf CriticalSelf EvaluatingSelf Defeating AttitudePurself RealizationSelf Actualization CritiqueSelt
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“Living in a spiritual manner, exhibiting a joyous and mindful embrace of the manifold wonders of an earthy existence, enhances life. A person develops spirituality by spending solitary time thinking about the larger issues in life. Scripting a personal philosophy for conducting a person’s life is a spiritual testament. A spiritual person seeks a system of general truths that encoded statement transforms their character.”

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“Metaphysical anxiety of knowing that I am nothing standing in the crux of infinity haunts me. Self-centered mind chatter is a symptom of the illness of my soul. I instigated this banal writing excursion attempting to escape the monotony of the self, the tedium of living an exclusively external life of sensation and acquisition. I lived a vain, materialist, and empty life seeking pleasurable diversions from thinking and perceiving. I stupidly asked what I can take from life and measured the value of existence by repeatedly assessing what I received from living and ignored what I illiberally refused to give.”

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“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.”

WritingSelf HelpSurvivalSelf ImprovementPersonal DevelopmentWritersWriters On WritingWriting ProcessSelf Help QuotesWriters QuotesWriters And WritingWriting PhilosophyLearning By DoingWounds To The HeartLearning From The PastWounded SoulsLearning From AdversityLearning From Our Struggles
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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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“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”

StoriesLiteratureBooksMemoirStorytellingReading BooksAutobiographyBiographiesLiterature QuotesNarrative WritingWriting VoiceBiographicalReading QuoteAuthorial Viewpoint
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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?”

StoriesMemoirStorytellingMemoir WritingStorytellersWriting MemoirStory Of Your LifeStories Of PeopleStories Of 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.”

StoriesMemoirStorytellingAutobiographyMemoir WritingWriting MemoirEssayistStory Of Your LifeNarrative WritingAutobiographical
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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.”

MemoirStorytellingPhilosophy Of LifeMeaning Of LifeLife And DeathMemoir WritingHardshipsMeaning Of Life QuotesStory Of Your LifeStory Of Life
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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.”

MemoirPhilosophy Of LifeWriters On WritingWriting ProcessWriting QuotesJourney Of LifeMemoir WritingStory Of Your LifeStory Of 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.”

WritingMemoirWriters On WritingWriting ProcessMemoir WritingWriters On ThinkingWriting MemoirPersonal EssaysEssayistWriters On Writing Books
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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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