Best 171 quotes in «diaries quotes» category

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.

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.

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)

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

… 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.

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!

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.

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

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

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 means yes indeed.

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

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.

A drawing of the nude is a most revealing expression because it is at once the most private and the most personal. Often such drawings are made with no thought of public exhibition. They possess the intimacy of diaries.

A man's diary is a record in youth of his sentiments, in middle age of his actions, in old age of his reflections.

A manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note, and a still relevant love letter.

After the success of Buddenbrooks, he married and fathered six children. Yet the surviving diaries tell us of recurrent sexual problems - and of Katia Mann's extremely sympathetic response to them

A great library contains the diary of the human race.

An introspective man who doesn’t keep a diary consigns himself to a special hell

Among the Diaries beginning with the second quarter of our century, there is frequent mention of a lady then becoming famous for her beauty and her wit: "an unusual combination," in the deliberate syllables of one of the writers, who is, however, not disposed to personal irony when speaking of her.

A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

A person loves to review his own mind. That is the use of a diary, or journal.

A picture means I know where I was every minute. That's why I take pictures. It's a visual diary.

But the thing I felt most strongly about, and put at the end of one of the prison diaries, was education.

Cars are like rolling diaries, metal and plastic and paint tableaux of the last ten years of their drivers' lives ... every dent, every drooping slice of chrome, has a story behind it.

Certainly when you read someone's diary [ superficial] that's a word that jumps to mind.

Dear Diary: My teen angst bullshit now has a body count.

Each new day is a blank page in the diary of your life.

Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.

Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.

Fights don't solve matters, they just make things worse. (Diary 19)

First of all, let me get this straight: This is a JOURNAL, not a diary. I know what it says on the cover, but when Mom went out to buy this thing I SPECIFICALLY told her to get one that didn't say 'diary' on it.

Fitzgerald said a very interesting thing in his diary; that human life proceeds from the good to the less good - that is, it's always worse as you go on. That's true.

For in our family an experience was not finished, not truly experienced, unless written down or shared with another.

For now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end in its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help sooth me.

(from John Hay's diary) “The President never appeared to better advantage in the world,” Hay proudly noted in his diary. “Though He knows how immense is the danger to himself from the unreasoning anger of that committee, he never cringed to them for an instant. He stood where he thought he was right and crushed them with his candid logic.

Fundamentally, diaries are about loneliness.

Anyway, yes, telephones but not mobile phones, fish and chips still wrapped in actual newspaper and still with some kind of flavour, people visiting each other without having to consult their appointment diaries, not being able to record anything from the television; if you missed it you missed it - these were all the kinds of thing that made up the normality of the seventies.

A proper family diary with everyone's events and parties in it really helps organise the household.

At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer.

But we don’t remember those lives. We can’t read our diaries.’ ‘It doesn’t matter. We are where we are, however we got here. What matters is where we go next.’ ‘But can we choose that?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘We’re Dead. Can we really choose anything?’ ‘Maybe. If we want to bad enough.

Dark Water was one of my favourite films to shoot because of Walter. I had seen the previous films he had directed, Central Station and Motorcycle Diaries, and I thought they were great. I really trusted him

DIARY, n. A daily record of that part of one's life, which he can relate to himself without blushing.

I always say, keep a diary and someday it'll keep you.

I always feel vulnerable talking about the poetry aspect of my career because it's little diary entries that I need to sometimes close read, and to reveal that much, it's a bit nerve-racking.

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.

I always thought of writing as public, I never thought of writing a diary. I had been struck by, jolted by things I had read, and I wanted to do the same to others. I don't think it ever was the notion of an autobiography; I skipped that phase totally, I think.