Diary Quotes

“A diary with no drawings of me in it? Where are the torrid fantasies? The romance covers?”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Bones

“In chaos, there is fertility.”
― Anais Nin

“Selling my soul would be a lot easier if I could just find it.”
― Nikki Sixx, The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.”
― Pablo Picasso

“Everyone thinks I'm showing off when I talk, ridiculous when I'm silent, insolent when I answer, cunning when I have a good idea, lazy when I'm tired, selfish when I eat one bite more than I should.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“It's a good thing most people bleed on the inside or this would be a gory, blood-smeared earth.”
― Beatrice Sparks, Go Ask Alice

“I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more...”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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

“Please read my diary, look through my things and figure me out.”
― Kurt Cobain, Journals

“The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.”
― Virginia Woolf

“You may want to keep a commonplace book which is a notebook where you can copy parts of books you think are in code, or take notes on a series of events you may have observed that are suspicious, unfortunate, or very dull. Keep your commonplace book in a safe place, such as underneath your bed, or at a nearby dairy.”
― Lemony Snicket, Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography

“I don't have a diary, I don't write things into a diary. I imprint myself into the sky and when the sunlight shines brightly, I can stand under the sun's rays and everything I have imprinted of myself into the sky, I will begin to see again, feel again, remember. And when the wind begins to blow, it blows the details over my face, and I remember everything I left in the sky and see new things being born. I am unwritten.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Zoo-Wee Mama!”
― Jeff Kinney

“For obvious reasons, I never told you about my notebook, with a cover as green as mansions long ago, which I use as a commonplace book, a phrase which here means 'place where I have collected passages from some of the most important books I have read.”
― Lemony Snicket, Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography

“Who else but me is ever going to read these letters?”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“The saddest line you scraped in your diary was not that you cried but those moments when we both shared smile.”
― Santosh Kalwar

“How do we know that our life really happened and that we are not simply accumulating details, making it all up as we go along?”
― Rachel Klein, The Moth Diaries

“Morning: Slept.
Afternoon: Slept.
Evening: Ate grass.
Night: Ate grass. Decided grass is boring.
Scratched. Hard to reach the itchy bits.
Slept.”
― Jackie French, Diary of a Wombat

“He started keeping a journal — had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“You too know that all my eyes see, all I touch with myself, from any distance, is Diego. The caress of fabrics, the color of colors, the wires, the nerves, the pencils, the leaves, the dust, the cells, the war and the sun, everything experienced in the minutes of the non-clocks and the non-calendars and the empty non-glances, is him.”
― Frida Kahlo, The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

“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.”
― Ernesto Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

“The poets and philosophers I once loved had it wrong. Death does not come to us all, nor does the passage of time dim our memories and reduce our bodies to dust. Because while I was considered dead, and a headstone had been engraved with my name, in truth my life was just beginning.”
― L.J. Smith, Bloodlust

“If you've ever tried to keep a diary, then you'll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, you're always stuck in thethenand you can never catch up to what's happeningnow,which means thatnowis pretty much doomed to extinction.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“The following year the house was substantially remodeled, and the conservatory removed. As the walls of the now crumbling wall were being torn down, one of the workmen chanced upon a small leatherbound book that had apparently been concealed behind a loose brick or in a crevice in the wall. By this time Emily Dickinson was a household name in Amherst. It happened that this carpenter was a lover of poetry- and hers in particular- and when he opened the little book and realized that that he had found her diary, he was “seized with a violent trembling,” as he later told his grandson. Both electrified and terrified by the discovery, he hid the book in his lunch bucket until the workday ended and then took it home. He told himself that after he had read and savored every page, he would turn the diary over to someone who would know how to best share it with the public. But as he read, he fell more and more deeply under the poet’s spell and began to imagine that he was her confidant. He convinced himself that in his new role he was no longer obliged to give up the diary. Finally, having brushed away the light taps of conscience, he hid the book at the back of an oak chest in his bedroom, from which he would draw it out periodically over the course of the next sixty-four years until he had virtually memorized its contents. Even his family never knew of its existence.

Shortly before his death in 1980 at the age of eighty-nine, the old man finally showed his most prized possession to his grandson (his only son having preceded him in death), confessing that his delight in it had always been tempered by a nagging guilt and asking that the young man now attempt to atone for his grandfather’s sin. The grandson, however, having inherited both the old man’s passion for poetry and his tendency towards paralysis of conscience, and he readily succumbed to the temptation to hold onto the diary indefinitely while trying to decide what ought to be done with it.”
― Jamie Fuller, The Diary of Emily Dickinson

“Advice to explorers everywhere: if you would like to recieve due credit for your discoveries, keep a detailed account of your journeys as Columbus did. On Septemeber 28, 1492, after four weeks at sea, he writes: Dear diary...I means journal. Yes, dear journal. That's what I meant to say. Whew. Anyway, we have yet to discover America, and the crew has become increasingly rebellious. I have decided to turn back if we have not spotted it by Columbus Day. Will write again later if not killed by crew. P.S. Last night's buffet was fabulous, the ice sculptures magnificent.”
― Cuthbert Soup, Another Whole Nother Story

“He will never let her go. Never. she belongs to him..Forever.”
― Awwthentic, The Prince and The Fairy

“Why should I be sad? Everyone has to die. If you have a body, it's too late to cry. It's only funerals I can't stand.”
― Rachel Klein, The Moth Diaries

“Keeping a journal: The short entries are often as dry as instant tea. Writing them down is like pouring hot water over them to release their aroma.”
― Ernst Jünger, A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945

“I'm sorry. This is diary, not enlightenment.”
― Maryse Holder, Give Sorrow Words: Maryse Holder's Letters From Mexico