To keep a diary is to attempt a difficult literary form. Its effectiveness is likely to derive from a special blend of honesty and appetite for life that gives the power to record everyday happenings while magically freeing them from banality and triviality.
My songs are basically my diaries. Some of my best songwriting has come out of time when I've been going through a personal nightmare.
The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.
I've been keeping a diary for thirty-three years and write in it every morning. Most of it's just whining, but every so often there'll be something I can use later: a joke, a description, a quote. It's an invaluable aid when it comes to winning arguments. 'That's not what you said on February 3, 1996,' I'll say to someone.
Each new day is a blank page in the diary of your life. The secret of success is in turning that diary into the best story you possibly can.
A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.
There are many reasons for keeping a diary: to make a note of facts that one considers important; to open one's heart, to give vent to one's feelings, to make confessions; from the instinct of economy which sometimes encourages a writer to make good use of even the smallest crumbs of his life, so that he may have one more book to publish; or again from vanity and self- satisfaction.
Each new day is a blank page in the diary of your life.
A man's diary is a record in youth of his sentiments, in middle age of his actions, in old age of his reflections.
The point of the daily diary exercise is not to record what you already know about what happened to you in the last 24 hours. Instead, it’s an invitation to the back of your mind to come forward and reveal to you the perishable images about the day you didn’t notice you noticed at all.
Yes, there is no doubt that paper is patient and as I don't intend to show this cardboard-covered notebook, bearing the proud name of "diary," to anyone, unless I find a real friend, boy or girl, probably nobody cares. And now I come to the root of the matter, the reason for my starting a diary: it is that I have no such real friend.
Keeping a diary is advanced-level living. I spend way too much time trying not to curl up in the corner like a giant fetus & weep to keep a diary.
I have decided to keep a full journal, in the hope that my life will perhaps seem more interesting when it is written down.
There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!
I don’t keep a travel diary. I did keep a travel diary once and it was a big mistake. All I remember of that trip is what I bothered to write down. Everything else slipped away, as though my mind felt jilted by my reliance on pen and paper. For exactly the same reason I don’t travel with a camera. My holiday becomes the snapshots and anything I forget to record is lost.
I swear, you are the only person I know who makes decisions based on what will provide the best material for a diary.
My friend is not allowed to go out today. I sit by his side and read him passages from his own life. They fill him with surprise. Everyone should keep someone else's diary; I sometimes suspect you of keeping mine.
Claire was struggling through last summer’s diary volume when Myrnin popped in through the portal, wearing a big floppy black hat and a kind of crazy/stylish pimp coat that covered him from neck to ankles, black leather gloves, and a black and silver walking stick with a dragon’s head on it. And, on his lapel was a button that said, If you can read this, thank a teacher.
They say it's the good girls who keep diaries. The bad girls never have the time. Me, I just wanna live a life I'm gonna remember even if I don't write it down.
I would like permission to fetch a note from my mother, sir' Ridcully sighed. 'Rincewind, you once informed me, to my everlasting puzzlement, that you never knew your mother because she ran away before you were born. Distinctly remember writing it down in my diary. Would you like another try?' 'Permission to go and find my mother?'
Fights don't solve matters, they just make things worse. (Diary 19)
Some would assert that Providence was at work shaking out its pockets in Humanity's lap. Other would argue for that mindless choreographer, Chance. Either way it was a simple thing: a lost diary fell into the hands of a soul-sick war hero on a train from Bombay to Jaipur just when he'd grown tired of the scenery and needed something to keep his thoughts from the minefield of his wretched thoughts. In such mild ways is the groundwork laid for first kisses and ruined lives.
These are the experiences I wish to record in this book, which should really be called The Diary of a Palaeontologist. But in committing them to paper I found it advisable to alter and add a good deal, to enable the reader without specialized training to follow me along the winding paths of palaeontology and prehistory.
Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother.
She read it again. It was fascinating and surreal, like reading a diary that had been hers when she was a teenager, secret and heartfelt words written by a girl she only vaguely remembered. She wished she'd written more. Her words mad her feel sad and proud, powerful and relieved." p 272
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