Quotes & Sayings About Writing A Journal

My wife Cecily Adams was dying of cancer, my daughter Madeline was struggling to overcome an autism diagnosis, and my father was dying, all at the same time. Writing the journal was a cathartic experience, and an extremely positive one. — Jim Beaver

I realized Michael was right. I mean, I am always writing in this journal. And I do compose a lot of poetry, and write a lot of notes and emails and stuff. I mean, I feel like I am always writing. I do it so much, I never even thought about it as a talent. It's just something I do all the time, like breathing. — Meg Cabot

Now the truth is, writing is a great way to deal with a lot of difficult emotional issues. It can be very therapeutic, but that's best done in your journal, or on your blog if you're an exhibitionist. Trying to put a bunch of *specific* stuff from your personal life into your story usually just isn't appropriate unless you're writing a memoir or a personal essay or something of the sort. — Patrick Rothfuss

If you're serious about becoming a wealthy, powerful, sophisticated, healthy, influential, cultured and unique individual, keep a journal. Don't trust your memory. When you listen to something valuable, write it down. When you come across something important, write it down. — Jim Rohn

Writing a journal article combines all the elements that deter motivation: The probability of success is low; the likelihood of criticism and rejection is high; and the outcome, even if successful, isn't always rewarding. — Paul J. Silvia

got the Journal to buy me a Fat Mac." I had convinced the big guys in New York that if I was going to be writing about Apple, I'd better be familiar with their latest machines. — Brent Schlender

Even today I keep a Dream Journal. It's whatever's going on in my subconscious, or things from dreams or even interesting items that pop into my head. I have thousands of pages of notes which I hope someday will turn into stories, or movies ... Being on the road gives me breathing time and the opportunity to think about what to do next. In fact right before I came down for lunch today, I was writing down notes about my feelings. Things that I need to do to keep motivated. I need to be motivated if I am to going to devote fifteen months to writing another book. And I couldn't write a book just because it's a commercial idea. I need to have a compelling reason. — Clive Barker

A good journal entry- like a good song, or sketch, or photograph- ought to break up the habitual and life away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought to be a love letter to the world. — Anthony Doerr

Write the date and under that write about anything you like; it doesn't have to be about you. Write until you feel like stopping. Then stop. If you like, do this more than once. If you are already writing a journal, then one day this week make your entry about how and why you began your journal. Write about what were you were hoping to achieve in journalling and reflect on how well that has panned out. Think and write about the unexpected benefits and rewards you've got from it. — Ray Blake

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

In the letters he sends to his friend, Werther recounts both the events of his life and the effects of his passion; but it is literature which governs the mixture. For if I keep a journal, we may doubt that this journal relates, strictly speaking, to events. The events of amorous life are so trivial that they gain access to writing only by an immense effort: one grows discouraged writing what, by being written, exposes its own platitude: "I ran into X, who was with Y" "Today X didn't call me" "X was in a bad mood," etc.: who would see a story in that? The infinitesimal event exists only in its huge reverberation: Journal of my reverberations (of my wounds, my joys, my interpretations, my rationalizations, my impulses): who would understand anything in that? Only the Other could write my love story, my novel. — Roland Barthes

I sometimes start keeping a journal about the writing process itself. Particularly when I get the ideas, and I am trying to brood over the chaos phase. In writing a novel, you really have to brood over a lot of chaos of ideas and possibilities. — Sue Monk Kidd

Be a collector of good ideas. Keep a journal. If you hear a good idea, capture it, write it down. Don't trust your memory. — Jim Rohn

If you feel like keeping a journal-that neither you nor anyone else on earth will ever want to read-be my guest. But if you want to write something that may eventually see the light of day, that a magazine might buy or a publisher publish, then you'll have to knock off the journaling and do the grunt work that real writing requires. — Robert Masello

Write your dreams in journal,note book, card or on a cork. When you pen down your dreams, an a inner strength and divine power is activated for your to work towards the fulfillment of your dreams. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The Paraclete and "Book of Martha" narratives were ultimately versions of the dream of "fixing" of the human species that had driven (and stymied) the Parables books: "On the one hand," she writes in her journal, "I want to write fix-the-world scenario. I seem to need to write them. The fact that I don't believe in them--don't believe humanity is fixable--does create a problem — Gerry Canavan

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

We're all meant to lean on something. Or someone.' I smile. He frowns. He surprises me and grabs the pen out of my hand. He starts writing something down in his neat block letters. He slides the journal back to me. 'I build walls around myself. I lean on those.' I don't need to ask him why. Everybody builds walls - it's for protection. I scribble quickly. 'Maybe you should break the walls down once in a while.' 'I'll just build them up again', he writes. 'But maybe you'll add a few windows the next time around. Or a door? — Katie Kacvinsky

Keep a gratitude journal. Write down at least three things a day you are either thankful for, made you smile or genuinely inspired you. — Robert Holden

I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour - write, write, write. — Madeleine L'Engle

Writing in a journal reminds you of your goals and of your learning in life. It offers a place where you can hold a deliberate, thoughtful conversation with yourself. — Robin S. Sharma

Some may say [journal keeping] is a great deal of trouble. But we should not call anything trouble which brings to pass good. I consider that portion of my life which has been spent in keeping journals and writing history to have been very profitably spent. - If there was no other motive in view [except] to have the privilege of reading over our journals and for our children to read, it would pay for the time spent in writing it. — Wilford Woodruff

The word "journal" has in its root the word jour, French for day. A journey was the distance that could be traveled in a day. A journal, therefore, consisted of the writing one recorded per day. — Sheila Bender

When writing my Leg book, I drew heavily on the detailed journals I had kept as a patient in 1974. Oaxaca Journal, too, relied heavily on my handwritten notebooks. But for the most part, I rarely look at the journals I have kept for the greater part of a lifetime. The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing. — Oliver Sacks

Of course we will send postcards to Nutsawoo. And we shall bring him back a present as well. In fact,' she went on, with the instinctive knack every good governess has for turning something enjoyable into a lesson, and vice versa, 'I will expect all three of you to practice your writing by keeping a journal of our trip so that Nutsawoo may know how we spend our days. Why, by the time we return, he will think he has been to London himself! He will be the envy of all his little squirrel friends,' she declared.
Penelope had no way of knowing if this last statement was true. Could squirrels feel envy? Would they give two figs about London? Did Nutsawoo even have friends? — Maryrose Wood

Millions of people are joined in the knowledge that writing brings insight and calm in the same way that prayer, meditation, or a long walk in the woods does. They have discovered that writing allows the racing mind to move at the pace of pen and paper or the pace of typing on the waiting screen - that journal writing is a spiritual practice. — Christina Baldwin

Through journal writing, you'll discover how to get more benefit from everything that you've experienced. In the process, you'll discover that what you've learned from being a survivor has enriched your life beyond anything you've ever imagined. — Frank McCourt

Keeping a [journal] need not be a major chore-just a few minutes of notes each day can be valuable. Writing crystallizes insights, fools the defense of forgetfulness, and builds a collection of ideas and reflections that can spur further insights even years later. — Roger N. Walsh

Woolf drew on her memories of her holidays in Cornwall for To the Lighthouse, which was conceived in part as an elegy on her parents. Her father was a vigorous walker and an Alpinist of some renown, a member of the Alpine Club and editor of the Alpine Journal from 1868 to 1872; he was the first person to climb the Schreckhorn in the Alps and he wrote on Alpine pleasures in The Playground of Europe (1871). By the time he married Julia Duckworth in 1878, however, a more sedentary Leslie Stephen was the established editor of the Cornhill Magazine, from which he later resigned to take up the editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography in 1882, the year of Woolf 's birth. Stephen laboured on this monumental Victorian enterprise until 1990, editing single-handed the first twenty-six volumes and writing well over 300 biographical entries. He also published numerous volumes of criticism, the most important of which were on eighteenth-century thought and literature. — Jane Goldman

Putting words on paper regularly is part of the necessary discipline of writing. A journal is a great way to do that. — Pearl Cleage

I didn't know until high school that I was interested in writing in any real way. But there was this boy that I had a crush on, and I used to tell him all the time what I felt about him. Finally he gave me a blank journal and said to write it all down - and it didn't take me very long to realize how much I loved writing. — Cristina Henriquez

I believe the term "blog" means more than an online journal. I believe a blog is a conversation. People go to blogs to read AND write, not just consume. — Michael Arrington

If you submit an
article to a major refereed clinical journal and it is accepted
upon first submission without a single revision, let me
know and I will take you to dinner the next time you are in
Portland, Oregon. — Robert B. Taylor

Writing in a journal each day, with a structured, strategic process allows you to direct your focus to what you did accomplish, what you're grateful for, and what you're committed to doing better tomorrow. Thus, you more deeply enjoy your journey each day, feel good about any forward progress you made, and use a heightened level of clarity to accelerate your results. — Hal Elrod

[writing to Stirling in 1740]
... an unlucky accident happened to some of the French mathematicians in Peru. It seems that they were shewing French gallantry to the natives' wives, who have murdered their servants destroyed their instruments and burnt their papers, the Gentlemen escaping narrowly themselves. What an ugly article this will make in a journal. — Colin Maclaurin

I wasn't writing home. I wasn't writing a death letter, either. I was writing a death journal, a piece of fiction meant for my family and my fiancee, Sara. — Clint Van Winkle

I throw ideas out into the open when I really should just be writing them down in a journal. — Dan Deacon

Never stop writing. Whether you're writing a novel, screen play or just keeping a journal, it's integral that you make writing a daily process. The proof of the commitment to your craft is just how much time you spend doing it, whether it's for business or pleasure. Integrate your craft into your every day life, and you'll be as good as gold. — Leigh Hershkovich

'Life's That Way' was an extraordinarily difficult book to write, because it wasn't written as a book. It was written as a journal of events that were happening as I wrote it, without the space or time either to digest or analyze those events and without the hindsight and peace that writing in the aftermath would have provided. — Jim Beaver

Only the broken heart has the ghost of a chance to grieve, to forgive, to long, to transform.
Christina Baldwin, author of Life's Companion, Journal Writing as a Spiritual Practice, 1990. Used with author's permission — Judith-Victoria Douglas

Writing in Library Journal, Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of Book envisioned a digital ecology in which "parts of books will reference parts of other books. Books will be woven toghether out of components in remote databases and servers." Kevin Kelly wrote in The New York times Magagzine: "In the the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages. — Jeff Jarvis

The journal preserved her dignity; she might look and behave like and live the life of a trained nurse, but she was really an important writer in disguise. And at a time when she was cut off from everything she knew - family, home, friends - writing was the thread of continuity. It was what she had always done. — Ian McEwan

For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house ... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail. — Paul Auster

I read less of everything now. With only fond memories of others' work, it will be interesting to give my own journal writing a try now. — Jonathan Carroll

I have a thing - I call it magic - but I feel like I can write stuff down in the middle of the night and wake up and it happens. I write what I want in my journal. — Ester Dean

That's the difference between a real journal and one that's invented for a novel - a novel journal has to be manipulated so someone reading it can have enough comprehension, which means the person writing it would've had to have a sense of a someday-audience. — Cris Mazza

The act of self-expression - through writing a journal or letters - often enables a survivor to distance himself from his fears. — Nathaniel Philbrick

I wish I could keep a journal. I have a lot of journals with one page half written in. I sometimes will write myself a quick email on my Blackberry when I think of something. — Louis C.K.

Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way.
[Interview, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2009] — Cormac McCarthy

These days I keep a journal, so I'm constantly sketching down my thoughts, or lines that come to me ... ideas for songs. And then when I have a moment to myself, I'll sit down with my guitar and open my journal, and start kind of massaging things together, and see if a song takes shape. Or sometimes, I'll just be hanging out with my guitar and come up with a chord progression or a lick, and that'll sort of sit around for a while waiting to marry itself to some words. So it's sort of haphazard and it's like ... junk culture. I go around finding shiny objects and I glue them together laughs. — Ani DiFranco

Writing a journal means that facing your ocean you are afraid to swim across it, so you attempt to drink it drop by drop. — George Sand

As I work on yet another draft of my story, I try to remember these lessons. A journal entry is for its writer; it helps its writer refine, perceive, and process the world. But a story - a finished piece of writing - is for its reader; it should help its reader refine, perceive, and process the world - the one particular world of the story, which — Anthony Doerr

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior. — Christina Baldwin

I write journals and would recommend journal writing to anyone who wishes to pursue a writing career. You learn a lot. You also remember a lot ... and memory is important. — Judy Collins

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up. — Jane Yolen

And maybe these words have become something more than emails; maybe they are a kind of journal. Writing to you is like writing to another piece of myself. — Amy Reed

I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories. — Elmore Leonard

Sometimes I was in a mood to write a song as if I was writing in my journal and reveal certain parts of me that I was ready to reveal. — Madonna Ciccone

Writing in a journal is just a stall, a waiting game, a way to tell yourself that you're working when you're not, that you're doing something of value when you're just using up paper, that you're a writer when in fact you're just going through the motions of one. Look at me! I have blank paper in front of me-and now I'm filling it, with words! — Robert Masello

If you hear a good idea, capture it; write it down. Don't trust your memory. Then on a cold wintry evening, go back through your journal, the ideas that changed your life, the ideas that saved your marriage, the ideas that bailed you out of bankruptcy, the ideas that helped you become successful, the ideas that made you millions. What a good review-going back over the collection of ideas that you gathered over the years. So be a collector of good ideas for your business, for your relationships, for your future. — Jim Rohn

My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either. — Kevin Henkes

The best person to write for is yourself - and what better place to start than in a journal. — E.L. James

For years I've advocated keeping a gratitude journal, writing down five things every day that brought pleasure and gratefulness. — Oprah Winfrey

He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato. — Grant Morrison

Not for a moment did he consider keeping a journal. He would never allow anyone to read his private thoughts; therefore, he did not risk writing them down. "I'd rather take it to my grave," he said. And anyway, when was a journal ever honest? "It either tells a lot of truths to cover a single lie, " he said, "or a lot of lies to cover a single truth. — Michael Finkel

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

A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed. Or so it is with me. Thus my writing life consists of spells of languor alternating with fits and spasms of mad typing. At all times, though, I keep a journal, a record book, and most everything begins in the form of notes scribbled down on the pages of that journal. — Edward Abbey

What the ethnographer is in fact faced with - except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection - is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity; interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households ... writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of") a manuscript - foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. — Clifford Geertz

A couple of pieces of advice for the kids who are serious about writing are: first of all, to read everything you can get your hands on so you can become familiar with different forms of writing: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, journalism. That's very important. And also keep a journal. Not so much, because it's good writing practice. Although it is, but more because it's a wonderful source of story starters. — Ann M. Martin

The main thing to do at the end of the day is to write in a gratitude journal all the things that you are grateful for that happened that day. You will invite even more abundance into your life. — Deepak Chopra

A phrase may come to me as I am walking, and, once I write it down in my journal, the rest of the poem will unravel from that catalyst. — Stephen Vincent Benet

I started writing a journal, and I was learning so much along the way. How to deal with your family, how to deal with your friends. — Tom Brokaw

When we saw our plane on TV as breaking news, it was the most surreal experience. A lot of the women were crying. There was a gentleman who was writing in his journal and crying. Seeing that isn't easy. — Taryn Manning

They're just clothes,' she remembered writing down in the leafy, thin pages of her journal. 'And the warmth of them no longer comforts you nor belongs to you. They're just fabric without an owner. A familiarity that has faded and an attachment that no longer has a name, just a brand mark stitched into the seams.' She remembered her hand flowing quickly and purposefully across the page as her eyes shifted from the journal to the sweater to the journal again.
'And when I slip them over my head. I smell not your fragrance and feel no longer the emptiness you left behind. I see me in a mirror, with a sweater on. And I look as radiant and beautiful, and broken, and whole, and relentlessly happy as you left me. — Adriana Rodrigues

Images are taking over, and writers are a dying breed. The Norman Mailers of today are reduced to writing pun-filled captions for paparazzi photos. Blogs
which were threatening enough to professional writers
are being replaced by video blogs. We writers need to embraced the Second Commandment as our rallying cry for the importance of words. In a literally biblical world, all publications would look like the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Or the way it used to look, anyway. — A. J. Jacobs

It seems as if I can only thing if I write my journal, it just connects the part of my head that is busy doing things with the part that is busy thinking about everything else. I know all these pepole are so busy because they love each other and me. We are a noisy crowd of love — Nancy E. Turner

Your diary should be a nepenthe. — Joe Dunthorne

I am carrying out my plan, so long formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I am writing for myself alone. Thus I shall always tell the truth, I hope, and thus I shall improve myself. These pages will reproach me for my changes of mind. — Eugene Delacroix

I do have a journal, that I write all my thoughts in every day. So that's kind of something. I also have a burn box where I write secrets down and put it in a box. — Miranda Cosgrove

I never wrote anything down. I never kept a diary, never kept a journal. I did write one letter home about touring with the Doors that I used as a reference for the book for some details there, and then I was glad I had that, but that was it. — Linda Ronstadt

Gratitude isn't just a feeling, it's an action. Expressing gratitude by writing in a journal, taking a photo, or shooting a video creates a lasting impression that can bring more gratitude into the world-for children and adults. — Janice Kaplan

I do keep a tiny little journal in which I write passages that I read and want to hold on to. This practice is sort of the opposite of Twitter. — Dani Shapiro

Books are portals for the imagination, whether one is reading or writing, and unless one is keeping a private journal, writing something that no one is likely to read is like trying to have a conversation when you're all alone. Readers extend and enhance the writer's created work, and they deepen the colors of it with their own imagination and life experiences. In a sense, there's a revision every time one's words are read by someone else, just as surely as there is whenever the writer edits. Nothing is finished or completely dead until both sides quit and it's no longer a part of anyone's thoughts. So it seems almost natural that a lifelong avid reader occasionally wants to construct a mindscape from scratch after wandering happily in those constructed by others. If writing is a collaborative communication between author and reader, then surely there's a time and a place other than writing reviews for readers to 'speak' in the human literary conversation. — P.J. O'Brien

Writing journal is for those people who find no interest in living a life of victimhood and limited personal freedom. — Deepak Burfiwala

Writing in a journal activates the narrator function of our minds. Studies have suggested that simply writing down our account of a challenging experience can lower physiological reactivity and increase our sense of well-being, even if we never show what we've written to anyone else. — Daniel J. Siegel

I choose to write because it's perfect for me. It's an escape, a place I can go to hide. It's a friend, when I feel out casted from everyone else. It's a journal, when the only story I can tell is my own. It's a book, when I need to be somewhere else. It's control, when I feel so out of control. It's healing, when everything seems pretty messed up.
And it's fun, when life is just flat-out boring. — Alysha Speer

I had to be the world's biggest loser, writing about hair, and stuff about my body. No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that? — Benjamin Alire Saenz

I write constantly, but only in my journals. I have three of them: one for travel, one for home, and one I write in before bed. But the last thing I want is other people reading it ... What's really fun is reading your journal, like a year later ... — Cameron Diaz

Curiously, the balance seems to come when writing is woven into every aspect of my life, like eating or exercising - one flows constantly into the next: I'll wake up and have coffee, read the news, then write a letter or two (always in longhand), then go teach, and after teaching write a bit in a journal - dreams, what I had for breakfast and lunch and why I had it, what's on the iPod, sexual habits, etc. - then read a bit, then work on a real bit of writing ... you get the idea. — Kevin Keck

All right, you caught me. I'm secretly obsessed with you and spend all my free time writing about you in my journal. 'Dear Diary, today Will was an ass for the 467th day in a row. He's so dreamy — Elizabeth Scott

Research material can turn up anywhere - in a dusty old letter in an archive, a journal or some old photographs you find in a charity shop. — Sara Sheridan

My normal life strategy when faced with a difficult situation is to think hard about all my possible options, try to understand the points of view of the other people involved, ask for advice from a few trusted friends, do a little research on the internet, ask those same friends about the new information my research uncovered, do a little writing in my journal, and then think some more before coming to a careful but not intractable decision. — Ali Davis

I always instruct my students to write a great deal. Write a journal. Take notes. Write when you are feeling wretched, when your mind is about to break down ... who knows what will float up to the surface? I am an unashamed believer in the magical powers of dreams; dreams enhance us. Even nightmares may be marketable
there is something to be said for the conscious, calculating exorcism of nightmares, if they give to us such works as those of Dostoyevsky, Celine,and Kafka. So the most important thing is to write, and to write nearly every day, in sickness and in health. In a while, in a few weeks or a few years, you can always make sense of that jumble of impressions ... or perhaps it will suddenly reveal its sense to you. — Joyce Carol Oates

Sometimes when one cannot stand the story or novel one
is working on, it helps to write something else - a different
story or novel, or essays venting one's favorite peeves, or exercises
aimed at passing the time and incidentally polishing up
one's craft. The best way in the world for breaking a writer's
block is to write a lot. Jabbering away on paper, one gets
tricked into feeling interested, all at once, in something one is
saying, and behold, the magic waters are flowing again. Often
it helps to work on a journal, since that allows the writer to
write about those things that most interest him, yet frees him
of the pressure of achievement and encourages him to develop
a more natural, more personal style. — John Gardner

The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he is alive and real, and not dying and without truth. — Maurice Blanchot

Then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer. — Anais Nin

Writing is another powerful way to sharpen the mental saw. Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context. — Stephen Covey

The bicycle was proclaimed a boon to all mankind, a thing of beauty, good for the spirits, good for health and vitality, indeed one's whole outlook on life. Doctors enthusiastically approved. One Philadelphia physician, writing in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children, concluded from his observations that for physical exercise for both men and women, the bicycle is one of the greatest inventions of the nineteenth century. — David McCullough

Journal writing is, foremost, a way to order and reframe perspective. — Alexandra Johnson

Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others - as well as to ourselves - the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world. — Daniel J. Siegel