Best 258 quotes in «autobiography quotes» category

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.

Here’s what I want you to understand. You can’t trust the voice in your head—the one that’s talking to you all the time. It’s more often wrong than right. You can think of this trick as learning to turn the volume way down and eventually turning it off altogether. Then you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

He was eight years older than I was, most of the calendar year.

[His research into biblical criticism had lead him to the conclusion that most of what was contained in traditional religion simply wasn't true] Was I to lie in order to teach the truth? ...Was I to repeat these words? It was impossible. It was certain they would stick in my throat. On these grounds the separation was decided by me.

How is it possible to write one's autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?

I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages.

I am constantly telling my own story to myself, and these days that's about all the narrative flow I can handle.

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.

I am halfway through Hillary Clinton's latest called "Living History"...pretty lighthearted on the scale...unlike David Hick's autobiography...I had to skip a couple of hundred pages in the middle of that one because it was too distressing for me to read. Undoubtedly yours will be the same...I will read the beginning, skip all the awful bit in the middle and read your happy ever after bit at the end.

I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

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

I didn't find my story; it found me, as autobiography always does: finds you out in your deepest most private places.

I don't know which hurt more: his rejection, his punch, or my own elder siblings laughing at my pain.

I don,t just want success for my self ,I want my success to benefit others . Osman Gulum

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.

I believe that we are who we choose to be. Nobody is going to come and save you. You've got to save yourself. Nobody is going to give you anything. You've got to go out and fight for it. Nobody knows what you want except you, and nobody will be as sorry as you if you don't get it. So don't give up your dreams.

I don't need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster.

...if it be true that every novel contains an element of autobiography—and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can only express himself in his creation—then there are some of us to whom an open display of sentiment is repugnant.

If I was building any new kind of life to live, it really didn't seem that way. It's not as if I had turned in any old one to live it. If anything, I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library -everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.

If I wrote an autobiography, I'd have to sue the author for defamation...

If you don't invite God as a summer guest, he will not come in the winter of your life" said Lahiri Mahasaya

If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - than my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.

I have a disease; I see language.

I have heard that in the United States, people remember exactly what they were doing when planes hit the Twin Towers. In my country, too, we remember a plane crash that way. There is this difference: On September 11, nearly three thousand people died. In Rwanda, smaller in size and population than Ohio, the number was three times that many, every day, for a hundred days.

I have found out the hard way that the path from victim to victory hinges on one word…Choose.

I knew it was coming. I knew they didn't have the nerve. Three days in and they've got faces like vexed tomatoes, their skins flaking sci-fi style: burnt to fuck. They were an embarrassment; not only to me and the wife and The Fall fans but to their own generation.

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked. Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets Power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.

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.

I have spent my life in a painstaking effort to tell about things as they are to me, so that they will not sound like autobiography but simply like notes, like factual reports.

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.

I just want to this about that.

I never want to make screw-you money like the rest of the financial services industry.

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.

In the conduct of my newspaper, I carefully excluded all libeling and personal abuse, which is of late years become so disgraceful to our country

İnsanların pek çoğunun bellekleri, sevmekten vazgeçtikleri ölülerinin sessiz sedasız yattıkları terk edilmiş mezarlıklardır. unutulmayan acı unutkanlıklarına yönelen bir küfürdür.

In the way of a reflection of my family and friends I mused at the number of people that I encountered during the past 85 years. Everyone here has played an important part but there have been others, many of whom have now passed across the horizon of life, however the purpose of my reminiscing is to share happy thoughts while at the same time take a peek into the future. I can look back to those first few glimpses of my life and find my grandmother Ohme, Gertrude Thieme standing at what I perceived to be a high kitchen counter making sandwiches using a slice of almost not eatable German black bread they called schwartsbrod. With great care she laden it with lard, blootwurst or sometimes liberwurst, topped with the half of a crusty Keiser roll. I always got the heel of the roll, with a quarter lengthwise slice of a crunchy dill pickle. It was the first and last time I remember seeing her before she returned to Germany and the war. My sister Trudy had died a few years prior leaving a collective hole in my family. Her short life and subsequent death was devastating to my mother and father and I constantly felt the sorrow it brought into our home. My father unsuccessfully tried to make a success of a small delicatessen at 11 Nelson Avenue in Jersey City and we moved to 25 Nelson Avenue when my father started working as a chef at Lindy’s Restaurant on Broadway in Manhattan. At home we exclusively spoke German which was a hindrance during World War II. My mother and father never lost their German accent and the only one of my family that made a real effort to speak English without an accent was my Onkle Willie. My parents refused to associate with my Onkle Walter and his wife Tante Wilma although they always treated me kindly and I sometimes talked with my cousins Klein Walter und Norma. The neighborhood treated us as NAZI outcasts until Italy entered the war on the Axis side and suddenly we all had to prove that we were patriotic. Eventually I joined the tin can army and learned enough English to be accepted. As my accent faded I truly became an American.

I signaled the bus-driver and he stopped the bus for me right outside the cottage, and I flew down the steps of the bus straight into the arms of the waiting mother.

In moments of exhaustion, I think for some reason of writing an autobiography--proper work for tired artists--but every autobiographer must secretly believe he has triumphed in life. Maybe, incidentally, this accounts for the paucity of women's autobiographies--they know better.

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.

I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose the pages it prefers. It's not up to me to make the choice. I have the impression that the time is speading on past me more and more rapidly. I'm like a river that rolls on, dragging with it the trees that grow too close to its banks or dead calves one might have thrown into it or any kind of microbes that develop in it. I carry all that along with me and go on. It's the movement of painting that interests me, the dramatic movement from one effort to the next, even if those efforts are perhaps not pushed to their ultimate end. In some of my paintings I can say with certainty that the effort has been brought to its full weight and its conclusion, because there I have been able to stop the flow of time around me. I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say, and what I have to say is,increasingly, something about what goes on in the movement of my thought. I've reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.

I really think this kind of consensual cannibalism is such a perfect analogue for the reciprocal relationship between writer and reader, and especially between writers and readers of autobiography. The reader of an autobiography consumes the life of the author, and the author, in turn, consumes the life of the reader, that portion of it surrendered to reading, or listening to, the autobiography.

I tell people I was in the U.S. Army for three and a half years in WWII -- but what did I mainly do to beat the fascists? Play the banjo.

Ist einem das Lesen einmal zur Gewohnheit geworden - meist eignet man sich diese bereits in jungen Jahren an -, kann man sie nicht so leicht wieder ablegen und wird trotz YouTube und 3-D-Filmen, wenn man Zeit hat (oder auch wenn man keine hat), immer wieder aus freien Stücken ein Buch zur Hand nehmen. Und solange es Menschen gibt, seien es zwanzig oder sei es nur einer, mache ich mir keine ernsthaften Sorgen um die Zukunft der Literatur.

I think I was about twenty-five when I first said - more or less to myself - that I was quite a good second-rate poet. I repeated it aloud in a Guardian interview in 1976, and some people thought I was a coy old thing.

I struggle with words. Never could express myself the way I wanted. My mind fights my mouth, and thoughts get stuck in my throat. Sometimes they stay stuck for seconds or even minutes. Some thoughts stay for years; some have stayed hidden all my life. As a child, I stuttered. What was inside couldn't get out. I'm still not real fluent. I don't know a lot of good words. If I were wrongfully accused of a crime, I'd have a tough time explaining my innocence. I'd stammer and stumble and choke up until the judge would throw me in jail. Words aren't my friends. Music is. Sounds, notes, rhythms. I talk through music. Maybe that's why I became a loner, someone who loves privacy and doesn't reveal himself too easily. My friendliness might fool you. Come into my dressing room and I'll shake your hand, pose for a picture, make polite small talk. I'll be as nice as I can, hoping you'll be nice to me. I'm genuinely happy to meet you and exchange a little warmth. I have pleasant acquaintances with thousands of people the world over. But few, if any, really know me. And that includes my own family. It's not that they don't want to; it's because I keep my feelings to myself. If you hurt me, chances are I won't tell you. I'll just move on. Moving on is my method of healing my hurt and, man, I've been moving on all my life. Now it's time to stop. This book is a place for me to pause and look back at who I was and what I became. As I write, I'm seventy hears old, and all the joy and hurts, small and large, that I've stored up inside me...well, I want to pull 'em out and put 'em on the page. When I've been described on other people's pages, I don't recognize myself. In my mind, no one has painted the real me. Writers have done their best, but writers have missed the nitty-gritty. Maybe because I've hidden myself, maybe because I'm not an easy guy to understand. Either way, I want to open up and leave a true account of who I am. When it comes to my own life, others may know the cold facts better than me. Scholars have told me to my face that I'm mixed up. I smile but don't argue. Truth is, cold facts don't tell the whole story. Reading this, some may accuse me of remembering wrong. That's okay, because I'm not writing a cold-blooded history. I'm writing a memory of my heart. That's the truth I'm after - following my feelings, no matter where they lead. I want to try to understand myself, hoping that you - my family, my friends, my fans - will understand me as well. This is a blues story. The blues are a simple music, and I'm a simple man. But the blues aren't a science; the blues can't be broken down like mathematics. The blues are a mystery, and mysteries are never as simple as they look.

It is usually an act of vanity to assume that the world is sufficiently interested in one’s personality to spend twelve-and-six on one’s autobiography. Nowadays autobiographers either begin early in life and describe their reactions to daffodils, and Greek statues of boys, and God, and the Oxford Union, and the rugged kindliness of their dear old father, and so on, or else they wait till they are ninety and babble of crinolines, and the Tranby Croft scandal, and what Cardinal Newman thought of Disestablishment. Both of these types are consumed with vanity. They really think that an elegant dislike of calceolarias, or a recollection of John Brown’s repartee to Queen Victoria outside Crathie Church on an autumnal afternoon in 1878, is the sort of thing which the world wants to know. But for myself, I am not concerned with vanity.

It just so happened that a big old crocodile had been sunning himself on the beach very close to the soldier who was on point in the left-hand column, but the soldier was concentrating so hard on the tree line ahead that he didn’t notice the creature. Well, the crock got nervous and made a loud hissing sound and then headed for the river. I was nearby in the center column and watched as that soldier turned as white as a sheet.

I think spring is inside me. I feel spring awakening, I feel it in my entire body and soul. I have to force myself to act normally. I'm in a state of utter confusion, don't know what to read, what to write, what to do. I only know that I'm longing for something...

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.

It's about personal development. It's about creating your own character and pushing it to the limit. It's about pushing yourself so far out of your own and everybody else's idea of who you are and what you're capable of, that you no longer believe in limits. It's about reaching beyond your so-called potential, because your potential is never where you or anyone else expects it to be, not even close. It's about being able to say with the last breath of your life “I used all my potential and all my talents and pushed myself to the limit. I could not have fought any harder.