Quotes About Diary

“Each new day is a blank page in the diary of your life. The secret of success is in turning that diary into the best story you possibly can.”

— Douglas Pagels

“Sonething's getting in the way!
Something's just about to break!
I will try to find my place,
In the Diary of Jane.
As I burn another page,
As I look the other way,
I still try to find my place,
In the Diary of Jane ...”

— Breaking Benjamin

“To much has happened too fast Dear Diary. What I want is for nothing to happen at all.
I don't even want good things anymore. I just want nothing.”

— Lee Smith

“As a boy, he'd always had some elaborate project that had nothing to do with school. On Summit Avenue, alone in his aerie, he drew the stately homes across the street and numbered the many windows and doors, compiling a detailed log of his neighbors' activities. In sixth grade, simultaneously, he kept a diary concerning the girls he liked and a ledger chronicling every penny he made and spent. These secret fascinations led nowhere in the end, were left mysteriously incomplete like the detective novel he patterned after Sherlock Holmes, to be replaced by his next obsession. At Princeton, when he was supposed to be cramming for exams, he wrote a musical. In the army it was a novel. Nothing had changed. He was still that boy, happiest pursuing some goose chase of his own making, and lost without one.”

— Stewart O'Nan

“I loved the freedom writers diary and even though i only read it because my teacher made us i loved the book. it shows me some feelings that i also feel sometimes, and even though i never finished reading it because i got lazy its the only book ive ever liked”

— Erin Gruwell

“Jonah spoke what everyone was thinking. "Wouldn't it be Twilight Zone if the door was open, too?"
Hamilton tried the knob. It didn't budge.
Ian stepped forward and examined the lock. "Natalie's diary has better security than this." He produced a credit card and slipped it between the latch and the jamb. There was a click, and the door swung wide.”

— Gordon Korman

“[Bram Stoker] wrote in his diary: Must be President some day. A man you can't cajole, can't frighten, can't buy.”

— Edmund Morris

“Can you squeeze me
into an empty page of your diary
and psychologically save me?”

— Morrissey

“I had had a feeling of freedom because of the sudden change in my life. By comparison to what had come before, I felt immensely free. But then, once I became used to that freedom, even small tasks became more difficult. I placed constraints on myself, and filled the hours of the day. Or perhaps it was even more complicated than that. Sometimes I did exactly what I wanted to do all day-I lay on the sofa and read a book, or I typed up an old diary-and then the most terrifying sort of despair would descend on me: the very freedom I was enjoying seemed to say that what I did in my day was arbitrary, and that therefore my whole life and how I spent it was arbitrary.”

— Lydia Davis

“I once knew of a girl whose story forms the substance of the diary. Whether he has seduced others I do not know ... we learn of his desire for something altogether arbitrary. With the help of his mental gifts he knew how to tempt a girl to draw her to him without caring to possess her in any stricter sense.
I can imagine him able to bring a girl to the point where he was sure she would sacrifice all then he would leave without a word let a lone a declaration a promise.
The unhappy girl would retain the consciousness of it with double bitterness because there was not the slightest thing she could appeal to. She could only be constantly tossed about in a terrible witches' dance at one moment reproaching herself forgiving him at another reproaching him and then since the relationship would only have been actual in a figurative sense she would constantly have to contend with the doubt that the whole thing might only have been an imagination.”

— Søren Kierkegaard

“And just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels Saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper's (no less!-and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her, somehow. I love her.”

— Sylvia Plath

“Do you wonder that I avow this to you? Know, that in the course of your future life you will often find yourself elected the involuntary confidant of your acquaintances' secrets: people will instinctively find out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to tell of yourself, but to listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too, that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy; not the less comforting and encouraging because it is very unobtrusive in its manifestations."
"How do you know?
how can you guess all this, sir?"
"I know it well; therefore I proceed almost as freely as if I were writing my thoughts in a diary.”

— Charlotte Brontë

“Life is a house of cards, balanced on a tetter-totter,
precariously perched on a roller coaster.
The only thing that should surprise us about our surprises is that we are surprised by them.
Beth Cardall's Diary”

— Richard Paul Evans

“Aujourd'hui, rien.
That's what Louis XVI wrote in his diary on the day of the storming of the Bastille.”

— Jo Walton

“When I first started working on 'Secret Diary,' I definitely felt like I needed to shape up. The idea of being in my knickers on TV was a great incentive! Now I try to eat right, and I go to Bikram yoga three or four times a week. I have my 'naughty' days, and I indulge in pizza and cake, but so what!”

— Ashley Madekwe

“One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing. They are the journal and the diary of our time.”

— Robert Wilson

“I just try to tell a story rather than present an open diary to the world.”

— Adam Schlesinger

“In Hollywood now when people die they don't say, 'Did he leave a will?' but 'Did he leave a diary?'”

— Liza Minnelli

“Home has always been wherever I am. I'm not very attached to walls - or people, for that matter - so I've always loved travelling around. A book in my back pocket, a diary, and a pen is all I need to call any place home.”

— Lou Doillon

“I saw Roland Barthes's 'Mourning Diary' at a bookshop, and I felt it was like I was destined to see the book. I read it all in one go while I was in the shop. The book was mind-blowing.”

— Go Ah-sung

“By journey's end the brides were much better acquainted with their grooms and more or less pleased with the matches. Sybil Bingham wrote in her diary, thanking God for answering her prayer for filling "the void" with a husband like Hiram, a "treasure rich and undeserved." Having read his insufferable memoir, "A Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands", all I can say is: I'm happy for her?”

— Sarah Vowell

“The moment I was introduced to my wife, Emma, at a party I thought, here she is - and 20 minutes later I told her she ought to marry me. She thought I was as mad as a rat. She wouldn't even give me her telephone number - and she wrote in her diary: 'A funny little man asked me to marry him.'”

— Julian Fellowes

“Confine your imagination. Do not lose yourself to dangerous daydreams. Do not sit and ponder and dwell on a life you are not living. Do something active. Exercise. Work harder. Answer your emails. Fill your diary with harmless social activities. By doing, we stop ourselves imagining. And imagining for us is a fast-moving car heading toward a cliff.”

— Matt Haig

“At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.”

— Nigel Hamilton

“I read my sister's diary when I was 7. She was, I think, 13. It was awful to read it.”

— Jack Gleeson

“I kept a very full diary of my relationship with Nixon, for some strange reason, until he became president.”

— Billy Graham

“I kept a diary right after I was born. Day 1: Tired from the move. Day 2: Everyone thinks I'm an idiot.”

— Steven Wright

“I made the record that my life had me make. Each one is like a diary.”

— Lenny Kravitz

“That's what I must avoid: I mustn't put strangeness where there's nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out, and you continually stretch the truth.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

“My skin is my canvas. The artwork on it represents something that is very powerful and meaningful in my life. I look at my skin as something of a living diary because all my tattoos represent a time in my life. And I never wish to shut the door on the past, so I carry it all with me.”

— Dave Navarro

“A diary with no drawings of me in it? Where are the torrid fantasies? The romance covers?”

— Cassandra Clare

“Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother.”

— Richard Peck

“There are many reasons for keeping a diary: to make a note of facts that one considers important; to open one's heart, to give vent to one's feelings, to make confessions; from the instinct of economy which sometimes encourages a writer to make good use of even the smallest crumbs of his life, so that he may have one more book to publish; or again from vanity and self- satisfaction.”

— Alberto Moravia

“Ernst Dwinger in his Siberian Diary
mentions a German lieutenant-for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost
unbearable-who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery,
perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music which was audible to him alone.
And for us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished
beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection
which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.”

— Albert Camus

“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.”

— Alex Garland

“I realize I didn't like you. I just wanted to meet someone that understood me. I didn't know that you were speaking from the diary. I had mistaken it for love.”

— Jo Yoon-hee

“My diary entries during this period constantly refer to the importance of learning how to take criticism. If you shut yourself in your own little world, that will be the death of your theory. On the other hand, many of the criticisms you receive are pointless and simply reflect the view that anything new is bad. In such a delicate situation it is crucial to tread gingerly and be careful to appreciate the difference between pertinent and idiotic comments.”

— Joao Magueijo

“Write a diary, imagining that you are trying to make an old person jealous.”

— Joe Dunthorne

“He's comming to meet me on Sun. Cant wait!! ... Please God let him love me!! ... This could be it [followed by five happy faces] ... Hes going to publish my pictures Im so glad I didn't sleep with him either! ... I hate for men to want sex all the time. I hate sex anyway. (1992, diary entry as she prepares for a meeting with Paul Marciano, head of Guess.)”

— Anna Nicole Smith

“Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

“Are we absolutely certain that Becky Albertalli didn't just steal the diary of a hilariously observant teenage boy? Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda is a pitch-perfect triumph of wit and wordplay that feels timelessly, effortlessly now.”

— Tim Federle

“My photos are my diary. Every photo is no more than the representation of a single day. And each day contains the past and the projection into the future. That's why I feel compelled to indicate the date on every picture I take.”

— Nobuyoshi Araki

“The New York book was a visual diary and it was also kind of personal newspaper. I wanted it to look like the news. I didn't relate to European photography. It was too poetic and anecdotal for me ... the kinetic quality of new york, the kids, dirt, madness-I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I would be grainy and contrasted and black. Id crop, blur, play with the negatives. I didn't see clean technique being right for New York. I could imagine my pictures lying in the gutter like the New York Daily News.”

— William Klein

“To make my diary a little different I am going to call it a Thought Book ... I have thoughts that I never can use unlesss I write them down, for Aunt Miranda always says, Keep your thoughts to yourself.”

— Kate Douglas Wiggin

“Writing a diary every evening before going to bed is a good habit. We can record in the diary how much time we have devoted to our spiritual practice. The diary should be written in a way that helps us see our mistakes and correct them. It should not be a mere document of other peoples' faults or our daily transactions.”

— Mata Amritanandamayi

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

— Samuel Johnson

“I was working with real artists [in the Rum Diary] , and that's difficult to do and very rare, in this industry, ironically.”

— Amber Heard

“I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary.”

— Pablo Picasso

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

— Brenda Ueland

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

— Chuck Palahniuk