Best 171 quotes in «diaries quotes» category

The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium.

The photograph is to a great degree evidence of the conversation I had with the person. It's a part of my visual diary.

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.

There are times I'm completely uncomfortable with my works being performed publicly, and I haven't attended certain concerts because the prospect is akin to having a diary read on stage. But there are also situations - whether with an audience of one, or many - where the concert experience can be deeply special, and those experiences are often unpredictable, and wonderful when they occur.

The very idea of printing my diary has always struck me as completely superficial.

[The Rum Diary] is a prestigious movie and it's got a great, talented cast, so they wanted to make sure they had the right person for the role, but it was a torturous process. It was painful.

There's a great quote about Virginia Woolf, she had the same spiritual stake in her diaries as she had in her writing.

There's something about a blank page that makes me tingle.

The show [ Vampire Diaries] knows how to keep people on the edge of their seat, that's for sure.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Though my father was Norwegian, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English.

The whole point of diaries is that other people find them and read what you've put. I did once take to writing my inner thoughts on the computer at the end of other things I was writing and ended up faxing four pages of hideous stuff to my accountant so I don't do that now.

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.

Think about Mann's own daily routine (ascribed to Aschenbach), read the extant diaries and the letters in which he discusses the novella's themes, and it won't be so obvious that the attraction to Tadzio is completely unprecedented; it also won't be obvious that what Aschenbach wants is full sexual contact.

Until I read Anne Frank's diary, I had found books a literal escape from what could be the harsh reality around me. After I read the diary, I had a fresh way of viewing the both literature and the world. From then on, I found I was impatient with books that were not honest or that were trivial and frivolous.

We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.

When I read the book [The Adderall Diaries] I loved it, and I maybe had an inkling that there was a lot of good material in there. I didn't quite know at the time how to adapt it into a film, but I hoped I would figure it out one day.

when I first began this diary I said I would give a record of my inner life. I begin to wonder if I have said anything about my inner life. What if I have no inner life?

whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like.

Without doubt, keep a diary. From the day you're born, keep a diary, because we all forget things so quickly.

Why has my motley diary no jokes? Because it is a soliloquy and every man is grave alone.

When I was 16 I started keeping a diary in which I recorded my disagreements with the famous philosophers. I didn't insist that they were wrong, that I was right and I had to prevail. I just agreed and disagreed with them. I thought there was a high degree of probability that I was right and some other thinkers were wrong. But I wasn't positive about it.

You don't lose your swing between the ninth green and the tenth tee, and you don't lose your swing from one day to the next. If you think you do, something is going on that you don't understand. A diary might help explain it to you.

Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life.

Writing my own diary is the best form of remembrance, but only for my own use. I need these notes; it's like an impulse.

You want a love that consumes you, you want passion and adventure and even a little danger.

You know, some of the good part of blog theory was that blogs would be like diaries that the world could read. They would be spontaneous, whatever pops into your mind, as a diary would be.

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.

Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exist.

As a historical novelist, there is very little I like more than spending time sorting through boxes of old letters, diaries, maps, trinkets, and baubles.

A story told me by Michael Barrie: Jesus and the Blessed Virgin go out to play golf. The Blessed Virgin is at the top of her form, drives and lands on the green. Jesus slices and lands in the bushes. A squirrel picks up the ball and runs off with it. A dog grab the squirrel, which still holds the ball in its mouth. An eagle swoops down, picks up the dog, squirrel and ball, and soars into the air. Out of a clear sky, lightning strikes the eagle, which drops the dog which drops the squirrel which drops the ball, right into the hole. The Blessed Virgin throws down her driver and exclaims indignantly, ‘Look, are you going to play golf or just fuck around?

Because zombies can’t go out into the sun, most of them tend to be afraid of anything that can go into the sun and live to tell the tale.

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.

Daring soul has five diaries; gratitude, work, inspirational, prayer and language diaries.

For the next 16 hours, fueled by coffee and amphetamines, I wrestled with John Lennon's scrawls and codes and symbols. As I transcribed his words, I said them out loud like an incantation, and I began to feel Lennon's energy flowing through me.

I have kept this diary doggedly, day by day, because I believe a continuous record, no matter how full of trivialities, will always gradually reveal something of the subconscious mind behind it. I’ve never regretted keeping a diary yet. There are always a few nuggets of literary value under all that sand.

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.

So yesterday the high-ranking visitors came after all. . . H[immler} at their head. A slight, insignificant-looking little man, with a rather good-humored face. High peaked cap, mustache, and small spectacles. I think: If you wanted to trace back all the misery and horror to just one person, it would have to be him. Around him a lot of fellows with weary faces. Very big, heavily dressed men, they swerve along whichever way he turns, like a swarm of flies, changing places among themselves (they don't stand still for a moment) and moving like a single whole. It makes a fatally alarming impression. (January 30, 1944)

… my joints ache with fatigue, my dried up body trembles toward its own destruction in turmoils of which I dare not become fully conscious, in my head are astonishing convulsions.

Oh, he's a sweet thing and I love him so--and I love life--and everything's beautiful!

Social and cultural history is often comprised of whatever diaries and letters remain and that is down to chance and wide open to interpretation.

When your diary is full and your life is empty, get a date

The usual pronouncement that Truman Capote is a ‘birdbrain.’ Gore [Vidal] has finished a novel called Two Sisters in which he admits that he and Jack Kerouac went to bed together—or was that in an article? (Gore told me about so many articles he’s written and talks he has given that my memory spins.) Anyhow, Gore now regrets that he didn’t describe the act itself; how they got very drunk and Kerouac said, ‘Why don’t we take a shower?’ and then tried to go down on him but did it very badly, and then they belly rubbed. Next day, Kerouac claimed he remembered nothing; but later, in a bar, yelled out, ‘I’ve blown Gore Vidal!

...then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer.

The women cannot go out except to go to church or to the bullfight, and even that is unusual. I consider it a very ugly custom, and if I couldn't go out as I wished, I would leave this country [Spain], if only because of that one custom of the inhabitants.

Twenty seven years ago, during my first romantic relationship with a boy, I started keeping a diary about my thoughts and experiences. That diary formed the basis of my novel “A Dream of Two Moons,” the title of which comes from some paranormal occurrences from real life.

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...?

Women are like locked diaries that men expect to read like open books.

Yesterday evening Mickey and I and other deluded WAAFs went through the blackout and into the wilds of Hammersmith enduring the journey with the thought of the rollicking, witty West End show, Broadway Follies, studded with stars, to which we WAAFs had been invited free. I might say frightful, I might say terrible, awful, boring, tedious, but they only reveal the inadequacy of words. After the third hour, or so it seemed, I was convinced that I had died and was in hell, watching turn after turn in unending procession, each longer, each less funny, each more unbelievably bad than the last. During the interval, Hendon WAAFs rushed to the bar, scruffy WAAFs, obviously from West Drayton, sat still rollicking with mirth in the Stalls. We tossed back whisky and ginger beer and watched in a stupor the longer, duller, apparently unending second half. After came the journey back in the blackout made blue by our opinions of the evening.

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.