Diary Quotes

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

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.

“What are you doing now?” he (Ralph Waldo Emerson) asked. “Do you keep a journal?” So I make my first entry today.

What if it’s boring – or if it’s not boring, it might be too revealing, or worse, it might be too revealing and still be boring.

It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a diary. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one own’s identity.