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Quote by Kilroy J. Oldster

“A person learns about the world by interpreting and cogitating upon personal experiences and by examining other people’s choices and philosophical perspective. We also learn by communicating with other people including sharing our stories with a receptive audience”

Quote by Kilroy J. Oldster

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Dead Toad Scrolls

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Kilroy J. Oldster

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“It has been suggested that each person lives hermetically sealed within his or her self-perpetuated myths. Scholars postulate that we tell ourselves stories to make sense of our lives. We begin exploration of the self with the experience of failed transcendence. Philosophy originates from the experience of disappointment. Our failures lead us to discoveries. At birth, we know very little, almost nothing; all knowledge instigate from the experience and recognition of our limitations. With the uncertainty that surrounds our existence in the universe, perhaps we must create ourselves. Perchance we seek self-exploration when the myths that we once operated under no longer work. Perhaps we undergo self-analysis only when a coalescence of the past, the present, and the future betrays our current myth-making. Perhaps at such times when failure reigns center court, our survival instinct urges us to create a new story-line.”

“Philosophic thoughts allow people to use human reason and imagination to consider eternal matters and explore the ramifications of their own transience. American author Joan Didion postulated that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Conceivably a personal crisis propels a person to delve into creating a guiding philosophy for living with reduced mental and emotional turmoil. Alternatively, perhaps we tell stories to examine, explain, and justify our failures.”

“Reflecting on the past while living in the present, we make decisions that will reverberate in the future. Our daily actions, thought patterns, and the concepts we choose to cherish will create the paradigmatic structure of our life story; our collective decision-making determines our final manifestation.”

“Storytelling is an imperfect methodology to provide a true accounting to a multiplicity of bilateral and three-dimensional interactions. Language cannot reach every recess of the mind, it cannot document every emotional chord, and it cannot splice the discordant pieces within us. Each story by a writer represents the sanitized accounting of the mind’s depictions. Try as one might, employing a panoply of traditional technique or other slick tools of modernist stage craft, it is impossible to separate the teller from the telling any more than one can distinguish the author from their doppelganger writer’s voice.”

“A good story is both one hundred percent true and one hundred percent false. A good story uses small lies to take a stab at piercing larger truths. An overstatement and understatement are part of writer’s craft; each standing alone is an untruth. An understatement might be used as an attempt at humor, just as an overstatement might be used to probe a truth that lies beyond the exact retelling of who, what, when, and where style employed in police report writing. Even writing biography, autobiography, memoir, and personal essays that studiously and relentless adheres to established facts can distort the truth. Faithful adherence to stringing rote facts together omits many aspects of both the subject and the operable social, cultural, and political environment that stages human interaction, contest, conflict, drama, and strife.”

“Storytelling is one means to entertain, share knowledge, and transmit cultural ideology. Through the universal lens of storytelling, do we become familiar with the life altering dilemmas and moral challenges that fuselage provides the linkage to mode the character patterns essential to leading a principled life? By shuffling through scores of loose leafed stories, can we glean the clarity of thought and the lucidity of perception needed successfully to tackle our own life with gusto? Is reading stories of struggle and redemption one way that we become acquainted with the chemistry of pain and suffering that permeates the arteries of all thinking human beings? Does appreciation for other people’s hardbound stories assist us place the vertebrae of our own experiences into a telling template? Can we draw upon the accumulated experiences of other people’s lives as well as our own hands-on experiences when we see our lives folded into a comprehensible scabbard depicting what it means to be human and, therefore, fallible?”

“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.”

“This narrative scroll is my story. It represents a peep show into a self-prescribed, ceremonial quest to stare myself down, mutilate myself, slice myself into minuscule pieces, exam and innervate my paralytic soul. Writing this manuscript documenting disenchantment with my selfhood’s unsatisfactory interactions with significant life defining experiences constitutes a calculated surgical disembodiment of my former egoistical self. The act of writing my life story serves as a spiritual dismemberment undertaken to reconfigure and reconstitute my essential being. Perhaps this anatomical deconstruction of a delusional self represents a talisman-like step in attempted self-healing. Alternatively, perhaps this megalomaniac manuscript, which amplifies my psychopathic condition characterized by narcissistic fantasies of power and greatness, and chorusing ring of self-doubt, is nothing more than the sound and fury of an idiot’s paranoid rant. Is my self-induced schizophrenia running rampant, writing page after page of pure drivel, descending me deeper into a private hell? Perchance writing this oscillating scroll is a well-intended personal attempt to escape my mortality, an effort to cheat death by entering into the web of eternity, immerse my voice into the collective consciousness of humankind by creating an immortality vessel. Conversely, mayhap the illogical rant that demarks this scroll proves that the devil does take the hindmost.”

“We learn about ourselves by taking one footstep at a time along a road of discovery. Greek philosopher Heraclitus who lived around 500 BCE proffered cogent advice about how to acquire wisdom and achieve a proper perspective on all worldly events. ‘Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for truth, be ready for the unexpected. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one.’ This script tells of one man’s journeying a full circle in an effort to become one with all that exists.”