Quotes About Diary

If you've ever tried to keep a diary, then you'll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, you're always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what's happening now ; which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction.

In your diary, you quoted old Jiko saying something about not-knowing, how not-knowing is the most intimate way, or did I just dream that? Anyway, I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think maybe it's true, even though I don't really like uncertainty. I'd much rather 'know', but then again, not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive.

In therapy Katya realized how much her relationship with her son had been burdened by the shadows of her childhood, and memories of her mother came back to her more and more clearly, memories of the way she had refused to relate to her eldest daughter. Katya was now able to feel her infant needs and express them in a diary, from which her friend sent me an excerpt after Katya's death:

For once, he could look back at the past without regret, and at the future without bewilderment. Simply and touchingly, he wrote in his diary: "I have had so much happiness in my life so far that I feel, no matter what sorrows come, the joys will have overbalanced them.

Composing is what drives me; it's not the pursuit of fame. My songs are like pages in a diary.

Anne is remarkably restrained in calibrating the amount of fear she will admit into the diary. The air raids, the break-ins, and the brutality reported by the helpers and glimpsed from the window appear at regular intervals, so that the reader can never fully relax.

Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment.

In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.

In the diary one finds proof that, even in conditions that today seem unbearable, one lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand thus moved as it does today, when the possibility of surveying our condition at that time does make us wiser, but we therefore must recognize all the more the undauntedness of our striving at that time, which in sheer ignorance nonetheless sustained itself.

Deutschland hat Rußland den Krieg erklärt - Nachmittag Schwimmschule. (Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon) Franz Kafka, diary, August 2, 1914

I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.

By beginning a diary, I was already conceding that life would be more bearable if I looked at it as an adventure and a tale. I was telling myself the story of a life, and this transmutes into an adventure the things which can shatter you.

What you are trying to do is a piece of art that is perfect in itself as art and yet retains the imperfection, the human fragmented, chaotic characteristics of a diary written on the spot in white heat. I don't know whether it can be done. It's a problem.

The resistance is the material, the events, the enigmas, the obscure motivations of the characters. Avoid grappling with these and you have a surface affair—a linear pattern, a solo melody in one key and monotonous and eventually exasperating. I ask myself, isn't it this precisely which gives a diary its essential character?

Es cierto, como dice Hugo, que yo llevo mis pensamientos y especulaciones al diario y que él sólo es consciente del dolor que puedo causarle cuando ocurre algún incidente. Sin embargo, yo soy su diario. Sólo es capaz de pensar en voz alta conmigo o a través mío.

I have a natural flow in the diary: what I produce outside is a distillation, the myth, the poem. The elaboration is here. It is the gem made out of this natural outpouring. Shouldn't people prefer the gems?

La sinceridad del momento es la esencia de un diario.

Culta? Perdone que le diga, Víctor, pero es la primera persona que conozco que no ha sido capaz de leerse completo el diario de Ana Frank.

To write a diary is to make a series of choices about what to omit, what to forget. A memorable sandwich, an unmemorable flight of stairs. A memorable bit of conversation surrounded by chatter that no one records.

By journey's end the brides were much better acquainted with their grooms and more or less pleased with the matches. Sybil Bingham wrote in her diary, thanking God for answering her prayer for filling the void with a husband like Hiram, a treasure rich and undeserved. Having read his insufferable memoir, A Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands, all I can say is: I'm happy for her?

Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end—as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

Thalberg rose in all his craven majesty. Speaking for the assembled, he said the plaintiff and her attorney were making a grave mistake. The diary, in addition to creating a scandal devastating to the industry, would probably cause her to lose the case and the child too. They urged her to drop it and seek an out-of-court settlement.

Postscript: In 1952 Mary's diary and its copy were removed by court order from the bank vault where it had sat for sixteen years, and, with a judge standing by, the pages were set aflame and turned to ashes.