Diarist Quotes & Sayings

The good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the land. — Virginia Woolf

I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last. — John Banville

Few things in life can be so appalling as the difference between a dry antiseptic statement of a principle by a well spoken man in a quiet office, and what happens to people when that principle is put into practice. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Now I say I'm a diarist with an explanation I'll get back to you on. Someday I may try and write in memoir form. — Carrie Fisher

I feel that what I do is always contemporary with the society I'm living in ... If I wanted to explain myself, that's how I'd explain myself: that I'm a diarist. — David Bowie

--when men approach me to let me know that I was their first love, lets just say I have mixed feelings. Why did all these men find it so easy to be in love with me then and so complex to be in love with me now? — Carrie Fisher

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind. — Harold Nicolson

I've never really felt like a journalist. I've felt like a writer and a diarist. I have made myself vulnerable in my writing, and I think that vulnerability makes people strong. My favorite performances or works of art are always people showing that side of themselves. — Tavi Gevinson

I like to think of the world's greatest athlete coming up to bat against me - Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, I don't care who it is - and I'm looking at him thinking, you have no chance. — David Cone

The only way that we can avoid the sin of idolatry is by immersing ourselves in Spirit-enlightened study of God through the Scripture. — Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

I was looped in on your little romantic quest. The only way to get me out without it looking suspicious was to suggest that I come after you dumb asses, since I supposedly know your crappy personality so well. — Alexandra Bracken

[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation.
Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up.
Survival ... could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943.
Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot. — Blaine Harden

If we didn't have shadow we'd just sit around loving the light, likely doing nothing with it. — S. Kelley Harrell

Life,
perhaps less a document than an impression,
conveyed through partial glances,
stream-of-consciousness juxtapositions,
unpredictable rhythms,
a collage of sound,
a conscientious diarist,
a career of blackmail and scandal culminated in murder,
a blind man with a will of iron and a nervous system of gossamer. — Brian D'Ambrosio

We got to know each other on an intimate yet chaste level. — Kody Brown

A diarist named George Templeton Strong recorded in the winter of 1866 that even with two furnaces alight and all the fireplaces blazing, he couldn't get the temperature of his Boston home above 38 degrees Fahrenheit. — Bill Bryson

We won't win until the average parent believes drug reform protects kids better than the war on drugs. — Ethan Nadelmann

He was what she wanted, but it would mean so much more after a charged friendship; that long, exquisite exchange of gradually more intimate confidences, the slow accumulation of shared experiences, the languorous spiraling dance of attraction, coming and going and coming and going, winding closer and closer, until that laziness was sublimed in the engulfing heat of consummation. He — Iain M. Banks

Football players, like prostitutes, are in the business of ruining their bodies for the pleasure of strangers. — Ian Shoales

Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs. — Matt Ridley

Horses are moody quad-bikes that piss on your boot and cost thousands in vets' fees. — David Mitchell

I think television scripts have become really intriguing and well-done. And writers have stopped drawing any actual line between film and television they used to never cross. — Natalie Zea

Some mornings, she'd wake and vow, Today, I will get it right. I won't be such an awful mess of a girl. I won't lose my temper or make unkind remarks. I won't go too far with a joke and feel the room go quiet with disapproval. I'll be good and kind and sensible and patient. The sort everyone loves. But by evening, her good intentions would have unraveled. She'd say the wrong thing or talk a little too loudly. She'd take a dare she shouldn't, just to be noticed. Perhaps Mabel was right, and she was selfish. But what was the point of living so quietly you made no noise at all? "Oh, Evie, you're too much," people said, and it wasn't complimentary. Yes, she was too much. She felt like too much inside all the time. So why wasn't she ever enough? — Libba Bray

The nature of the video camera really makes you focus on the present. Since I have always been a diarist filmmaker, not one who stages scenes with actors, it has always been about the present moment. — Jonas Mekas

I'm actually a really nice guy, once you get to blow me. — Anthony Jeselnik

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading. — Edward Hirsch

Spring is nature's way of smiling... — Nanette L. Avery