Quotes by Diarists

Music and women I cannot but give way to whatever my business is.
Samuel Pepys
Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.
Anne Frank
It is a purely relative matter where one draws the plimsoll-line of condemnation and ... if you find the whole of humanity falls below it you have simply made a mistake and drawn it too high. And you are probably below it yourself.
Frances Partridge
I did this night promise my wife never to go to bed without calling upon God upon my knees in prayer.
Samuel Pepys
Think of all the beauty that's still left in and around you and be happy!
Anne Frank
I keep my ideals because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
Anne Frank
Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes.
Ned Rorem
Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can bel How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is I
Anne Frank
I did this night promise my wife never to go to bed without calling upon God upon my knees in prayer.
Samuel Pepys
Think of all the beauty that's still left in and around you and be happy!
Anne Frank
I keep my ideals because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
Anne Frank
Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes.
Ned Rorem
Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can bel How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is I
Anne Frank
We all live with the objective of being happy our lives are all different and yet the same.
Anne Frank
Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.
Ned Rorem
We all live with the objective of being happy our lives are all different and yet the same.
Anne Frank
The best remedy for those who are afraid lonely or unhappy is to go outside somewhere where they can be quiet alone with the heavens nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists and it certainly always will I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.
Anne Frank
How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment we can start now start slowly changing the world!
Anne Frank
Sooner or later you've heard all your best friends have to say. Then comes the tolerance of real love.
Ned Rorem
Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
Anne Frank
The best of a bad bargain.
Samuel Pepys
Artists by definition innocent don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.
Ned Rorem
Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out while Romantic grows from outside in.
Ned Rorem
This is the beginning of the end (talking about the war)... Everyone was saying... But the British Prime Minister said, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Do you see the difference?
Anne Frank
Now Autumn's fire burns slowly along the woods and day by day the dead leaves fall and melt.
William Allingham
Women should be respected as well! Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn't women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?...Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together!
Anne Frank
...if I only knew how much longer we had to put up with each other's company, I'd start counting the days.
Anne Frank
I think it's odd that grown-ups quarrel so easily and so often and about such petty matters. Up to now I always thought bickering was just something children did and that they outgrew it.
Anne Frank
It is becoming a bad dream-- in the daytime as well as at night. I see him nearly all the time and can't get at him, I mustn't show anything, must remain gay while I'm really in despair.
Anne Frank
Now public business takes up so much of my time that I must get time a Sundays or a nights to look after my own matters.
Samuel Pepys
There is a saying that, paper is more patient than man.
Anne Frank
The porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire- the desire every book has to be taken down and read, to live, to come into being in somebody's mind. He even hands the volumes over the counter, seeks them out in their proper places or returns them there without once realising that a Book is a Person and not a Thing.
W.N.P. Barbellion
There is a saying that "paper is more patient than man";it came back to me on one of my slightly melancholy days,while I sat chin in hand,feeling too bored and limp even to make up my mind whether to go out or stay at home. Yes, there is no doubt that paper is patient and as I don't intend to show this cardboard-covered notebook,bearing the proud name of"diary",to anyone,unless I find a real friend,boy or girl,probably nobody cares.And now I come to the root of the matter,the reason for my starting a diary:it is that I have no such real friend. Let me put it more clearly,since no one will believe that a girl of thirteen feels herself quite alone in the world,nor is it so.I have darling parents and a sister of sixteen.I know about thirty people whom one might call friends--I have strings of boy friends,anxious to catch a glimpse of me and who,failing that,peep at me through mirrors in class.I have relations,aunts and uncles,who are darlings too,a good home,no--I don't seem to lack anything.But it's the same with all my friends,just fun and joking,nothing more.I can never bring myself to talk of anything outside the common round.We don't seem to be able to get any closer,that is the root of the trouble.Perhaps I lack confidence,but anyway,there it is,a stubborn fact and I don't seem to be able to do anything about it.
Anne Frank
I've reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, I can't do anything to change events anyway.
Anne Frank
Misfortunes never come singly.
Anne Frank
Little bundle of contradictions
Anne Frank
May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity— a virtuous woman. Anything, Devil, but that.
Mary MacLane
As I stand among the barren gulches in these days and look away at the slow-awakening hills of Montana, I hear the high, swelling, half tired, half-hopeful song of the world. As I listen I know that there are things, other than the Virtue and the Truth and the Love, that are not for me. There is beyond me, like these, the unbreaking, undying bond of human fellowship—a thing that is earth-old.
Mary MacLane
From insipid sweet wine; from men who wear moustaches; from the sort of people that call legs 'limbs'; from bedraggled white petticoats: Kind Devil, deliver me.
Mary MacLane
I shall have to miss forever some beautiful, wonderful things because of that wretched, lonely childhood. There will always be a lacking, a wanting -- some dead branches that never grew leaves. It is not deaths and murders and plots and wars that make life tragedy. It is day after day, and year after year, and Nothing. It is a sunburned little hand reached out and Nothing put into it.
Mary MacLane
Sometimes I think I am a strange, strange creature -- something not of earth, nor yet of heaven, nor of hell. I think at times I am a little thing fallen on the earth by mistake: a thing thrown among foreign, unfitting elements, where every little door is closed -- every Why unanswered, and itself knows not where to lay its head. I feel a deadly certainty in some moments that the wild world contains not one moment of rest for me, that there will never be any rest, that my woman's-soul will go on asking long, long centuries after my woman's-body is laid in its grave.
Mary MacLane
An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop, they say. It is an absurdly incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a brain it certainly is not idle. And when one considers how brilliant a personage the Devil is, and what very fine work he turns out, it becomes an open question whether he would have the slightest use for most of the idle brains that cumber the earth.
Mary MacLane
People say of me, 'She's peculiar.' They do not understand me. If they did they would say so oftener and with emphasis.
Mary MacLane
It is the trivial little facts about anything that describe it the most effectively.
Mary MacLane
But I won't bore you any longer on the subject of old men. It won't make things any better and all my plans of revenge (such as disconnecting the lamp, shutting the door, hiding his clothes) must be abandoned in order to keep the peace. Oh, I'm becoming so sensible! ...
Anne Frank
Who else but me is ever going to read these letters?
Anne Frank
Surely there must be in a world of manifold beautiful things something among them for me. And always, while I am still young, there is that dim light, the Future. But it is indeed a dim, dim light, and ofttimes there's a treachery in it.
Mary MacLane
In the book Soldiers on the Home Front, I was greatly struck by the fact that in childbirth alone, women commonly suffer more pain, illness and misery than any war hero ever does. An what's her reward for enduring all that pain? She gets pushed aside when she's disfigured by birth, her children soon leave, hear beauty is gone. Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together.
Anne Frank
Sleep makes the silence and the terrible fear go by more quickly, helps pass the time, since it's impossible to kill.
Anne Frank
The weak fall, but the strong will remain and never go under!
Anne Frank
The art of living. Isn't that a funny expression?
Anne Frank
If you ever feel to express proper gratitude for the good things of this life, be sure that you express your gratitude for the right thing. Very likely you will not have a great deal of gratitude, and you must not waste any of it but what you do have will be of the most excellent quality. For it will accumulate, and the accumulation will all go to quality. And the things for which you are to be grateful are the bitternesses you have known.If you have had it in mind ever to give way to bursts of gratitude for this air that comes from off the salt sea, for that line of pearls and violets that you see just above the horizon, for the health of your body, for the sleep that comes to you at the close of the day, for any of those things, then get rid of the idea at once. Those things are quite well, but they are not really given to you. They are merely placed where any one can reach them with little effort. The kind fates don't care whether you get them or not. Their responsibility ends when they leave them
Mary MacLane
An appetite for knowledge is apt to rush one off one's feet, like any other appetite if not curbed. I often stand in the in the centre of the Library here and think despairingly how impossible it is ever to become possessed of all the wealth of facts and ideas contained in the books surrounding me on every hand.
W.N.P. Barbellion
I don’t want my ‘part’ taken! I haven’t ‘got’ a part! I hate the stupid geometrical figures by which people try to understand the emotions of others, imposing hard straight lines - or ‘sides’ as they call them - onto tender curvaceous human beings who have none.
Frances Partridge
It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature—like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines
Mary MacLane
You only really get to know a person after a fight. Only then can you judge their true character
Anne Frank
but i've slammed the door to my inner self; if he ever wants to force the lock again, he'll have to use a harder crowbar!
Anne Frank
Looking back into childhood is like turning a telescope the wrong way around. Everything appears in miniature, but with a clarity it probably does not deserve; moreover it has become concentrated and stylized, taking shape in symbolism. Thus it is that I sometimes see my infant self as having been set down before a blank slate on which to construct a map or schema of the external world, and as hesitantly beginning to sketch it, with many false starts and much rubbing-out, the anatomy of my universe. Happiness and sorrow, love and friendship, hostility, a sense of guilt and more abstract concepts still, must all find a place somewhere, much as an architect lays out the plan of a house he is designing - hall, dining-room and bedrooms - but must not forget the bathroom. In a child’s map, too, some of the rooms are connected by a serving-hatch, while others are sealed off behind baize doors. How can the fragments possibly be combined to make sense? Yet this map or finished diagram, constructed in the course of ten or twelve years’ puzzling, refuses to be ignored, and for some time to come will make itself felt as bones through flesh, to emerge as the complex organism which adults think of as their philosophy of life. Presumably it has its origins in both heredity and enviorment. So with heredity I shall begin.
Frances Partridge
You are all made of real poop.
Anne Frank
But feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.
Anne Frank