Quotes & Sayings About Diaries And Journals

What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled "enemy?" Weren't the Russians communists when they helped us slap down the Germans? And now. What could we do with the Russian nation if we bombed it to bits? How could we "rule" such a mass of foreign people - - - we, who don't even speak the Russian language? How could we control them under our "democratic" system...? — Sylvia Plath

The laws have become so straight-jacketing that presidents and their aides dare not keep journals or diaries, lest they be subpoenaed by avid special prosecutors. — Christopher Buckley

but the very content that comes from finding yourself is overshadowed by the knowledge that by doing so you are admitting you are not only a grotesque, but a special kind of grotesque. — Sylvia Plath

Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we've thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth. — Rob Bignell, Editor

I've kept journals at many times in my life starting from when I was about 13 or 14. But it's boring and contrived to keep a journal every day. Better to write as the mood strikes. — Erica Jong

There was more small talk, more laughing, sidelong glances, more of the unspoken physical friction that makes each new conquest so delightful. In the air was the strong smell of masculinity which creates the ideal medium for me to exist in. There was something in Emile tonight, a touch of seriousness, a chemical magnetism, that met my mood the way two pieces of a child's puzzle fit together. — Sylvia Plath

I am I because of that. — Sylvia Plath

I remember keeping a lot of journals and diaries and trying to form a complete thought just based off of those immediate, raw feelings. If anything, I was conscious about how I just always wanted to be as honest as possible, no matter how vulnerable it would make me seem. — Gallant

Thoughts are created in the act of writing. [It is a myth that] you must have something to say in order to write. Reality: You often need to write in order to have anything to say. Thought comes with writing, and writing may never come if it is postponed until we are satisfied that we have something to say ... The assertion of write first, see what you had to say later applies to all manifestations of written language, to letters ... as well as to diaries and journals — Frank Smith

I can only hazard. In the back of my mind there are bombs falling, women and children screaming, but I can't describe it now. — Sylvia Plath

If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve. — David Sedaris

I'll call you. Take care." And he was gone. So the rain comes down hard outside my room, and like Eddie Cohen," I say, "... fifteen thousand years - - - of what? We're still nothing but animals. — Sylvia Plath

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

to be aware that you must compete somehow, and yet that wealth and beauty are not in your realm. — Sylvia Plath

Gab has just returned this journal to me, saying he found it on the kitchen table. I suspect he's been reading it. If so - KEEP OUT!!! and I LOVE YOU!!! but mainly THIS IS PRIVATE. KEEP OUT!!!

M,
If this is a private journal then you shouldn't leave it open in a place where I can see it.
Gabriel — Sally Green

These empty pages are your future, soon to become your past. They will read the most personal tale you shall ever find in a book. — Anonymous

I remember Liz, her face white, delicate as an ash on the wind; her red lips staining the cigarette; her full breasts under the taut black jersey. She said to me, "But think how happy you can make a man someday." Yes, I'm thinking, and so far it's all right. But then I do a flipover and reach out in my mind to E., seeing a baseball game, maybe, perhaps watching television, or roaring with careless laughter at some dirty joke with the boys, beer cans lying about green and shiny gold, and ash trays. I spiral back to me, sitting here, swimming, drowning, sick with longing. I have too much conscience injected in me to break customs without disasterous effects; I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who can dispel sexual hunger freely, without misgiving, and be whole, while I drag out from date to date in soggy desire, always unfulfilled. The whole thing sickens me. — Sylvia Plath

Sometimes I grow
so tired of speaking
my emotions to you.

I open my mouth
and dust spills out
instead of feelings.

Dust, and the yellow
wings of moths,
and brittle paper,

scrawled over
with riddles that
lack solutions. — Gabriel Gadfly

Josephine Butler (1828-1907) writes in her journals, pamphlets and diaries of the second half of the nineteenth century about seeing thousands (yes, thousands) of little girls, some as young as four or five, in the illegal brothels of London, Paris, Brussels, and Geneva ... The children had a life expectancy of two years, yet the brothel owners, frquently women, seemed to have an unlimited supply ... 'Clean' children, who were free from venereal disease, commanded a high price. All this is well documented, but strangely Mrs [sic] Butler never mentions little boys, though this branch of the trade must have been going on. — Jennifer Worth

Over the last two years, I have been able to comb through The Prince's archives. I have been free to read his journals, diaries and many thousands of the letters. — Jonathan Dimbleby

Music was never just a hobby for me. I'd pick up a guitar every day to work on whatever I was writing at the time. I would put my ideas in songs the way some people might put them in diaries or journals. — Tracy Chapman

It was inestimably important for me to look at the lights of Amherst town in the rain, with the wet black tree-skeletons against the limpid streetlights and gray November mist, and then look at the boy beside me and feel all the hurting beauty go flat because he wasn't the right one-not at all. — Sylvia Plath

I lived in Calcutta for five months in 1999. While I was there, I read many journals, diaries, collections of letters and histories. — Susanna Moore

Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. — Sylvia Plath

Anyway, back to the crush. Sorry to shift gears so fast, but we both know why we're here. I mean, if I wanted to discuss the existential angst of motherhood I'd be writing in a journal. Diaries are for the down and dirty, the stuff you don't want people to ever find out about you. Journals are the things you leave open around the house, hoping a literary agent will wander in, read it and declare you the next genius of your age. — Lani Diane Rich

There is history to read- centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow. — Sylvia Plath