Quotes About Notebooks

We are an echo that runs, skittering, through a train of rooms. – Czeslaw Milosz, from "The Wormwood Star." The Separate Notebooks . (Ecco September 21, 1986) Originally published 1984.

You can have a pretty good first line but not a strong enough thought to tag along more lines and sometimes in the middle words become bored and make war on one another. Notebooks are full of these fragments, shrapnel of our intention. Life is short on conclusions and that's why it's often a struggle to end a poem.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself...Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss

Do you want to guess what's in here? I asked Dash. I think I've got it figured out already. There's a new supply of red notebooks in there, and you want us to fill them in with clues about the works of, say, Nicholas Sparks. Who? I asked. Please, no more broody poets. I couldn't keep up. You don't know who Nicholas Sparks is? Dash asked. I shook my head. Please don't ever find out, he said.

You can tell a lot about a person from the pages he or she chooses to journal on—I was strictly a college-ruled man myself, having no talent for illustration and a microscopic scrawl that made wide-ruled seem roomy.

He remembered that feeling, that yearly renewal of optimism that used to come to him while he was at the university, as if each year's virgin notebooks carried with them the promise of a better year, a brighter destiny.

We adjusted our neckties, picked up our notebooks, and hotfooted it upstairs for our first conference. As we stepped off the elevator, we looked down the hall to where Rose Woods, Mrs. Eisenhower's personal maid, stood beckoning to us from the First Lady's bedroom door.