Journals Quotes

“If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve.”
― David Sedaris

“Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.”
― Will Self

“Isn't it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be.”
― Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy in Spite of Herself

“Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing - singing, laughing, learning.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.”
― May Sarton

“It's 4am again and I'm just getting started. People are boring and I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed through my words. I want to get all fucked up and write real and raw and ugly and beautifully. I bet you're sleeping safe and calm, and you can stay there, it's safer there, and you wouldn't stand one night on this journey my mind wanders off to every night you close your eyes. I'll stay here one day and I will never come down.
I promise I can fly before I hit the ground.
It doesn't even hurt anymore.
I swear, it doesn't hurt.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“All night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of his own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly--not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things the outer limits would suffice.”
― Ernesto Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

“I should rather like to tear these last pages out of the book. Shall I? No-a journal ought not to cheat.”
― Dodie Smith

“Now I'll never see him again, and maybe it's a good thing. He walked out of my life last night for once and for all. I know with sickening certainty that it's the end. There were just those two dates we had, and the time he came over with the boys, and tonight. Yet I liked him too much - - - way too much, and I ripped him out of my heart so it wouldn't get to hurt me more than it did. Oh, he's magnetic, he's charming; you could fall into his eyes. Let's face it: his sex appeal was unbearably strong. I wanted to know him - - - the thoughts, the ideas behind the handsome, confident, wise-cracking mask. "I've changed," he told me. "You would have liked me three years ago. Now I'm a wiseguy." We sat together for a few hours on the porch, talking, and staring at nothing. Then the friction increased, centered. His nearness was electric in itself. "Can't you see," he said. "I want to kiss you." So he kissed me, hungrily, his eyes shut, his hand warm, curved burning into my stomach. "I wish I hated you," I said. "Why did you come?" "Why? I wanted your company. Alby and Pete were going to the ball game, and I couldn't see that. Warrie and Jerry were going drinking; couldn't see that either." It was past eleven; I walked to the door with him and stepped outside into the cool August night. "Come here," he said. "I'll whisper something: I like you, but not too much. I don't want to like anybody too much." Then it hit me and I just blurted, "I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them." He was definite, "Nobody knows me." So that was it; the end. "Goodbye for good, then," I said. He looked hard at me, a smile twisting his mouth, "You lucky kid; you don't know how lucky you are." I was crying quietly, my face contorted. "Stop it!" The words came like knife thrusts, and then gentleness, "In case I don't see you, have a nice time at Smith." "Have a hell of a nice life," I said. And he walked off down the path with his jaunty, independent stride. And I stood there where he left me, tremulous with love and longing, weeping in the dark. That night it was hard to get to sleep.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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.”
― Anaïs Nin

“When I moved, I unearthed the diaries I kept for ten years. I sat and went through them and they were a worthless burden to own. People will say it's tragic I threw them out, but I know it isn't.”
― Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut

“There is history to read- centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I have often fought, fought & won, not perfection, but an acceptance of myself as having a right to live on my own human, fallible terms.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

“In part. She sat down and pulled her necklace out of her shirt. "I read about it in my mother's journal. The Witches believe we are all parts of a whole. Like the phases of the moon. Together, we complete the circle and bring balance.”
― Amber Argyle, Witch Song

“For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I am grateful that you, journal, can look at me without closing your covers. Sometimes, that’s all I do: open and close you, open and close, all afternoon on my bed, expecting you to shut on me, but you never do.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“He had always kept a journal. When he was a young man, in a village outside Rotherham in Yorkshire, he had written a daily examination of his conscience...In the days of the butchery, his journal was full of his desire to be a great man, and his self-castigation... he was a good Latin teacher... a good supervisor... but he was not using his unique gifts, whatever they were, he was *going* nowhere, and he meant to go far. He could not read the circular and painful journals now, with their cries of suffocation and their self-condemnatory periods, but he had them in a bank, for they were part of a record, of an accurate record, of the development of the mind and character of William Adamson, who still meant to be a great man.

(-Morpho Eugenia, Angels and Insects)”
― A.S. Byatt, Angels and Insects

“Soft weather,
sleep and love”
― Anaïs Nin, THE JOURNALS OF ANAIS NIN, VOLUME 2

“Spring evening, soft and balmy and beautiful. The smell of the earth rose in the stillness like a dream cloud.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1914-1920

“It wasn’t really a journal. I tried keeping a journal, but it would always be one long entry filling the first seven pages, and then just nothing. Too hard.”
― Charlotte Leonetti

“But aren’t journals such as this basically occasions for candid assessments?
No. They’re not. They’re for telling oneself the fictions that are as honest as you can make them and still keep your life bearable.”
― Samuel R. Delany, The Atheist in the Attic

“A diary is useful during conscious, intentional, and painful spiritual evolutions. ... An intimate diary is interesting especially when it records the awakening of ideas; or the awakening of the senses at puberty; or else when you feel yourself to be dying.”
― André Gile

“When one is alone at night in the depths of these woods, the stillness is at once awful and sublime. Every leaf seems to speak.”
― John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

“Document your dreams.
Sketch that shape you saw.
Write those lyrics before they fade out.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Oneironaut’s Diary

“il nous change, il modifie la marche de notre vie." /
"it changes us, it alters the course of our lives.”
― André Gide, Journals 1889-1949

“Termino o dia, como de costume, diante do mar, esta noite suntuoso sob a lua, que escreve sobre as ondas lentas caracteres árabes com traços fosforescentes. O céu e as águas não acabam mais. Nele, como a tristeza está bem acompanhada!”
― Albert Camus, Diário de Viagem

“It struck me then that perhaps the bareness and wrongness of the world was an illusion; that things might still be real, and right, and beautiful, even if I could not see them - that if I stood in the right place, and was lucky this might somehow be revealed to me.”
― Helen Macdonald , H is for Hawk

“I’ve told a journal how I feel about you,
Out of fear of how you’d react
In the event of telling you.
Through past experiences, the happiest
Times I’ve had occurred when I kept them
To myself.
I’ve told this journal everything about you &
We’ve traveled page after page
In endless vacation.
How we’ve experienced things we both thought
We’d never experience.
How the food you normally scrunch your nose up at
Turned out to be some of the best things
you ever tasted & how badly I wanted
to be laid out on that plate.
To be the reason you sit back and undo the top
Button on your jeans.
The reason you tell your friends to come visit,
Your return trip back.
I’ve told a journal how I feel about you,
Out of fear of how you’d react.
Once I tell you, the you that I’ve come
To know and love will no longer be existent
& all I’ll have is another journal entry”
― Kewayne Wadley, Late Nights On Venus

“And the weak crumbs will report to the custodial arts.”
― cobain, pg. 48