diaries

An introspective man who doesn__ keep a diary consigns himself to a special hell

When I moved, I unearthed the diaries I kept for ten years. I sat and went through them and they were a worthless burden to own. People will say it's tragic I threw them out, but I know it isn't.

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.

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

Every evening I sat on the music-stool and wrote down my day, and it was as if I, Anna, were nailing Anna to the page. Every day I shaped Anna, said: Today I got up at seven, cooked breakfast for Janet, sent her to school, etc. etc., and felt as if I had saved that day from chaos. Yet now I read those entries and feel nothing. I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing. Words mean nothing. They have become, when I think, not the form into which experience is shaped, but a series of meaningless sounds, like nursery talk, and away to one side of experience. Or like the sound track of a film that has slipped its connection with the film. When I am thinking I have only to write a phrase like __ walked down the street_, or take a phrase from a newspaper, __conomic measures which lead to the full use of _ and immediately the words dissolve, and my minds starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the words, so that every word I see or hear seems like a small raft bobbing about on an enormous sea of images. So I can__ write any longer. Or only when I write fast, without looking back at what I have written. For if I look back, then the words swim and have no sense and I am conscious only of me, Anna, as a pulse in a great darkness, and the words that I, Anna, write down are nothing, or like the secretions of a caterpillar that are forced out in ribbons to harden in the air.

I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel...

Because zombies can__ 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.

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

What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.

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

Billy Pilgrim had a theory about diaries.Women were more likely than men to think that their lives had sufficient meaning to require recording on a daily basis. It was not for the most part a God-is-leading-me-on-a-wondrous-journey kind of meaning, but more an I've-gotta-be-me-but-nobody-cares sentimentalism that passed for meaning, and they usually stopped keeping a diary by the time they hit thirty, because by then they didn't want to ponder the meaning of life anymore because it scared the crap out of them.

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

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.

The need to document my insanity is an affliction I have not yet cured myself of...

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

It's not wrong to hustle hustlers. It's like killing murderers, a public service. -Damon Salvatore

Very touching," said a voice from the stairway. "Do you want me to imitate a violin?" - Damon

I've found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It's possible to make a connection with any kind of writing - as long as the writing is good.