Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Diary Quotes
Though watchful of the world around him and especially attentive to the miens of the men who might advance his career, Pepys also possesses an irrepressible gusto for life itself, and he works his hedonism hard: music-making, theater-going, flirting, drinking, paying social calls, reading, conversing and disputing with his wife. They’re all scribbled down in […]
Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system, too, the system of language and conceptualization. It proposed that human beings, but the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I – nor for that matter anyone else – will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.
On July 4, 1776, King George III wrote in his diary, “Nothing of importance today.”
The thing that he (Winston Smith) was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp… He dipped […]
A number of things that I put in (the diary) were inaccurate, and some of them simply weren’t true – On occasion, I discovered I would recount conversations that simply didn’t happen. (referring to his infamous diaries in which he boasted of his sexual dalliances with staff members)
I do not keep a diary. Never have. To write a diary every day is like returning to one’s own vomit.
I am enamoured of my journal.
The man, you will perceive, was making reminiscences – a sort of pleasure by ricochet, which comforts many in distress, and turns some others into sentimental libertines; and the whole book, if you will but look at it in that way, is seen to be a work of art to Pepys’ own address.
