Journal Entries Quotes

I was shut off from my body; I had barely thought about sexuality or longing. Up until this point, my sexual experiences had felt business like or even transactional...I hadn't been suppressing urges or denying my needs. I didn't feel like I had any, not corporeal ones. My journal entries from that time speak to depression and feelings of isolation, fears that a friend would leave, a sense that I had been responsible for my mother's departure and would therefore cause anyone I loved or needed to leave. I was still spending most of my time in my head. I was removed from my own feelings. ~ Carrie Brownstein

March 28, 2012
The dreams won't subside. I don't just have them at night anymore but during the day as well. Erotic flashes of her lips, her breasts, her thighs.
My imagination does not rest. I yearn to know what she feels like, what she tastes like. My dreams make me long for more.
This woman is a virus. Every cell in my body has been infected by her. I try to remain civil, normal when I'm in her presence but she'll lick her lips or play with the top of her collar and suddenly memories of my dreams will come flooding back.
This woman is a virus that has dominated every part of my being. She attacks my lungs, squeezing the breath out of me until I'm hopelessly gasping for air.
This isn't a want. This isn't a need. This is an ache. I ache with wanting. I ache with need. I ache until the pain finally leaves me feeling numb. I long for that numbness. It's the only time I feel like…I don't feel.
I try to run away, to keep my distance but this woman is a virus. She's in my blood. Her smile stops my feet from moving. The only time she allows me to breathe freely is when I inhale her perfume. I feel myself losing control.
These dreams, this ache is slowly driving me insane.
This woman is a virus and she's eating me alive. ~ Jacqueline Francis - The Journal

My comedy notebooks are filled with random journal entries. It's all the same. I can look back on old joke notebooks, and know exactly what was going on in my life. ~ Sarah Silverman

The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on 'Pretty Hate Machine,' came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form. ~ Trent Reznor

I'm tired of thinking about Agatha. Well, not about her, but about my loss of her. Today I went through some old boxes of mine and found some journal entries I wrote in the second grade. One was about the loss of a girl, the S name on my list, so I'll copy and paste it for posterity:

Today was a bad day. Stephany broke up with me for Tommy. I don't like that slimy Tommy. Tommy is a turtle. I used to like turtles but now I like warm blooded creetures. Maybe Stephany is a reptile disguised as a human jerkface. I won't cry because I am a soldier. Soldiers do not dispense tears. Soldiers kill their enemies. Tommy is my enemy. But the code of the moose says a warrior must eat what he kills. Does this mean I should have eaten my neighbors cat? I will not cry today or ever. I am fearless like my dad. My dad is a superhero. He is courageous and invisible. I haven't seen him in four years. When I see him next he'll probably tell me I am taller. Maybe I will tell him he is shorter. And fatter and balder. Maybe he will appear again and I can be normal. I would very much like to not wear wooden shoes anymore. Cats tongues are rough like sandpaper. Cats must never lick my shoes. Nobody licked my shoes the way Stephany did. I will miss her and her early-onset male pattern baldness. ~ Jarod Kintz

Once you're done being president, you tend to want to defend your record more than plumb your inner feelings. I find it hard to imagine Obama going home at night and writing sensitive, introspective journal entries about his meeting with John Boehner. ~ Gail Collins

Some people won't dog-ear the pages. Others won't place the book facedown, pages splayed. Some won't dare make a mark in the margin. Get over it. Books exist to impart their worlds to you, not to be beautiful objects to save for some other day. We implore you to fold, crack, and scribble on your books whenever the desire takes you. Underline the good bits, exclaim "YES!" and "NO!" in the margins. Invite others to inscribe and date the frontispiece. Draw pictures, jot down phone numbers and Web addresses, make journal entries, draft letters to friends or world leaders. Scribble down ideas for a novel of your own, sketch bridges you want to build, dresses you want to design. Stick postcards and pressed flowers between the pages.

When next you open the book, you'll be able to find the bits that made you think, laugh, and cry the first time around. And you'll remember that you picked up that coffee stain in the cafe where you also picked up that handsome waiter. Favorite books should be naked, faded, torn, their pages spilling out. Love them like a friend, or at least a favorite toy. Let them wrinkle and age along with you. ~ Ella Berthoud & Susan Elderkin

Eric penned nearly a dozen new journal entries in the next two months.
"I have a goal to destroy as much as possible," he wrote, "so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that."
It was a mark of Eric's ruthlessness that he comprehended the pain and consciously fought the urge to spare it. "I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom," [the computer game he played day and night] he wrote. "I have to turn off my feelings. ~ Dave Cullen

She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite. ~ Dave Eggers

Victorian London. Rome in the fifth century. Egypt in the early twentieth. There must have been a hundred different places listed, all with small journal entries, like Saw the Queen as she and the Prince rode past us on their way to Buckingham Palace and The camel nearly ate Gus's hair, ripped it from his scalp like grass and My God, if I never see another big-bellied man wrapped in a toga… ~ Alexandra Bracken

I may be in deep slop if the findings of a new study published in the latest issue of Neurology, journal of the American Academy of Neurology, prove to be true. The study conducted by University of Eastern Finland tested 1,449 people averaging 71 years of age and found that the subjects labeled "highly cynical" had a 2.54 times greater risk of developing dementia than those with the lowest cynicism rating.

I'd better tell my youngest son, Andy, about the study, too. I think he became a cynic before he turned 30, the predictable result of the massive self-administered force-feedings of the Story of Man in his pursuit of a Ph.D. in American history.

In Andy's defense, reading too much, too soon, of our track record on earth would make a cynic of anyone. Fortunately, his perusals have turned him into a champion of the underdog as well, another inevitability of historical research, particularly studies of our brutal conquest of the American West. ~ Lionel Fisher

The power of the pen is landmark of life. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal. ~ Steven Pinker

Another of Mack's patients says that the aliens have been taking eggs from her since she was sexually mature, and that her reproductive system baffles her gynecologist. Is it baffling enough to write the case up and submit a research paper to The New England Journal of Medicine? Apparently it's not that baffling. ~ Carl Sagan

I became a larger than life figure for one reason only. When you're quoted in the 'Wall Street Journal', the 'New York Times', constantly as the expert in the business people assume you're a lot bigger than you are. And then I had to run like hell to catch up with my own image. ~ Barbara Corcoran

Henry's recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while walking the streets, traveling to see a friend; and life does not stop while he remembers. Analysis in movement. No static vivisection. Henry's daily and continuous flow of life, his sexual activity, his talks with everyone, his cafe life, his conversations with people in the street, which I once considered an interruption to writing, I now believe to be a quality which distinguishes him from other writers. He never writes in cold blood: he is always writing in white heat.
It is what I do with the journal, carrying it everywhere, writing on cafe tables while waiting for a friend, on the train, on the bus, in waiting rooms at the station, while my hair is washed, at the Sorbonne when the lectures get tedious, on journeys, trips, almost while people are talking.
It is while cooking, gardening, walking, or love-making that I remember my childhood, and not while reading Freud's 'Preface to a Little Girl's Journal. ~ Anais Nin

Although he reputedly hated the label of 'guru', Peter Drucker was, by any standards, the greatest management guru the world has yet seen. In 1996, the McKinsey Quarterly journal described him as the 'the one guru to whom other gurus kowtow' and Robert Heller described him as 'the greatest man in the history of management', praise indeed for a man who described himself as 'just an old journalist'. ~ Peter Drucker

It was such ecstacy to dream, and dream - till you got a bite.

A scorpion bite. Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and kill the scorpion; and the next to bathe the bitten place with alcohol or brandy; and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in the future. Then came an adjournment to the bedchamber and the pastime of writing up the day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the other - a whole community of them at a slap. Then, observing an enemy approaching - a hairy tarantula on stilts - why not set the spittoon on him? It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous idea of the magnitude of his reach. Then to bed and become a promenade for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a whole through a raw-hide. More soaking with alcohol, and a resolution to examine the bed before entering it, in future. Then wait, and suffer, till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in under the bar, then slip out quickly, shut them in and sleep peacefully on the floor till morning. Meantime, it is comforting to curse the tropics in occasional wakeful intervals. ~ Mark Twain

And wonders of wonders, they both shut up and did as I said.
If I'd had time I would have pulled out my journal and made a note: Shame and Terric actually listened to me for once. Warn Hell. There's a freeze coming. ~ Devon Monk

[Adapted and condensed Valedictorian speech:]

I'm going to ask that you seriously consider modeling your life, not in the manner of the Dalai Lama or Jesus - though I'm sure they're helpful - but something a bit more hands-on, Carassius auratus auratus, commonly known as the domestic goldfish. People make fun of the goldfish. People don't think twice about swallowing it. Jonas Ornata III, Princeton class of '42, appears in the Guinness Book of World Records for swallowing the greatest number of goldfish in a fifteen-minute interval, a cruel total of thirty-nine. In his defense, though, I don't think Jonas understood the glory of the goldfish, that they have magnificent lessons to teach us. If you live like a goldfish, you can survive the harshest, most thwarting of circumstances. You can live through hardships that make your cohorts - the guppy, the neon tetra - go belly-up at the first sign of trouble. There was an infamous incident described in a journal published by the Goldfish Society of America - a sadistic five-year-old girl threw hers to the carpet, stepped on it, not once but twice - luckily she'd done it on a shag carpet and thus her heel didn't quite come down fully on the fish. After thirty harrowing seconds she tossed it back into its tank. It went on to live another forty-seven years. They can live in ice-covered ponds in the dead of winter. Bowls that haven't seen soap in a year. And they don't die from neglect, not immediately. They hold on for thre ~ Marisha Pessl

Let me put the contrast in a single concrete example. The physician who finds time to give personal attention to his patients and listens to them. carefully probing inner conditions that may be more significant than any laboratory reports, has become a rarity. Where the power complex is dominant, a visit to a physician is paced, not to fit the patient's needs, but mainly to perform the succession of physical tests upon which the diagnosis will be based. Yet if there were a sufficient number of competent physicians on hand whose inner resources were as available as their laboratory aids, a more subtle diagnosis might be possible, and the patient's subjective response might in many cases effectively supplement the treatment. Thoreau expressed this to perfection when he observed in his 'Journal' that "the really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure."

Without this slowing of the tempo of all activities the positive advantages of plenitude could not be sufficiently enjoyed; for the congestion of time is as threatening to the good life as the congestion of space or people, and produces stresses and tensions that equally undermine human relations. The inner stability that such a slowdown brings about is essential to the highest uses of the mind, through opening up that second life which one lives in reflection and contemplation and self-scrutiny. The means to escape from ~ Lewis Mumford

I never knew why or how writing could be so important until I learned about the no-talking rule and found that writing was the only way I could talk whenever I wanted. Writing always came to the rescue when I had to keep silent, and thereby became one of the greatest and most divine comforts I knew. What I couldn't say out loud I could always say in a note, letter, or journal first. And whenever I felt totally speechless, writing always allowed me to find the necessary words. ~ Karol Jackowski

I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years. ~ Richard Powers

I wondered if this longing in a three-year-old had sparked what came at eight. That fuzzy feeling of difference, that her crushes on female teachers or her cousin were more real than the other girls' crushes. Hers contained a desire beyond sweetness and attention, it fed a longing, beginning to flower green and yellow into a crocuslike lust, the soft petals opening into her awkward adolescence. It was not so much, she would write in her journal, that she wanted to have sex with women, but that she wanted to disappear inside of them forever. To hide. ~ Alice Sebold

On the evening of her eighteenth birthday, Maddy opened her journal and made a list of the jewels and precious stones she'd held. Gold, diamond, emerald; ruby, turquoise, pearl; amber, jade, marble ... There were some she had forgotten. Beneath these she listed what she thought were the most perfect tastes and smells. Coffee, cinnamon, peaches; vanilla, honey, basil; baking bread, fresh bread, toasting bread. ~ Sonya Hartnett

Then someone started pounding on the door. And not a little "Hey, what's up?" pound. Like there was a big sale on door pounds down at the Pound Outlet. Buy one, get one free at Pounds-n-Stuff.
Being the Journal of Abby Normal ~ Christopher Moore

[ ... ] The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
(Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption, Jan 15 2009) ~ Marcia Angell

Whether ideas like this are inspiration or insomnia, I don't know," he writes in his journal. "I do things by sixth sense." Patton ~ Bill O'Reilly

Emily Zanotti is a Republican political strategist and author. She is a regular contributor to The American Spectator and a featured opinion columnist with The Wall Street Journal. Her work has appeared across the political spectrum, in National Review, The Daily Caller, Slate, and elsewhere. ~ Joanne Bamberger

The discipline of AutoQuotery is based on generating axiomatic entries that technically provide a mechanism to serve later on as a network of neural synapses between the very same lexemes it is utilizing. However, those lexical atomic units are signed differently -by the AutoQuoter- from their usages in the dictionary and therefore behave semantically in a wave-like pattern and syntactically in a particle-like pattern within the boundaries of the produced Quotery Lexicon itself. As time passes by, the semantics attain a standing-waves state mimicking thereby the dictionary; and almost ends up putting the synapses in an idle state when no more signals are being transferred between the lexemes. Philosophy would insist that an idle state cannot be reached, while Reason would emphasize -as a response- that such a perception is only pedagogically sensed when engaging (by studying, practicing or teaching) in the AutoQuotery discipline. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

Replace Maladaptive Thoughts with Coping Statements

When you feel anxious in social situations, you probably have many false beliefs and maladaptive thoughts, such as "I don't fit in" or "I'm so awkward." An important part of coping with social anxiety is to be able to recognize when your thinking is clouded.
Use your journal to record events that make you feel anxious, and examine what you were thinking at the time and why. It may help to refer to the list of maladaptive thinking patterns on pages 25 and 26 to help you see when your thinking is faulty. Remember that figuring out your faulty thoughts requires that you be totally honest with yourself. Once you have identified your maladaptive thoughts, you can work to replace them with more constructive thoughts, called coping statements. ~ Heather Moehn

According to the British Journal of Psychiatry, marijuana can cause panic attacks. I don't know ... The only time I have ever seen a marijuana user look panicky is when they are out of marijuana. ~ Jay Leno

Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect was the work for which he ultimately won the Nobel Prize. It was published in 1905, and Einstein has another paper in the very same journal where it appeared - his other paper was the one that formulated the special theory of relativity. That's what it was like to be Einstein in 1905; you publish a groundbreaking paper that helps lay the foundation of quantum mechanics, and for which you later win the Nobel Prize, but it's only the second most important paper that you publish in that issue of the journal. ~ Sean Carroll

I've kept journals at many times in my life starting from when I was about 13 or 14. But it's boring and contrived to keep a journal every day. Better to write as the mood strikes. ~ Erica Jong

He shut his eyes and grabbed the hair at the back of his head. The pain had not eased. It had just intensified. ~ Jacqueline Francis - The Journal

After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

A sort of journal which I can write in whenever I feel inclined. I do not suppose there will be much interest to other people; but it is not intended for them. ~ Bram Stoker

Focus on one thing at a time whenever possible. You might think of an organized person as juggling many things at once, but actually it's been proven more efficient to handle things one at a time. A recent Wall Street Journal article discussed how managing two important mental tasks at once reduces the brainpower available for either task. So, while people think they are saving time by multitasking, they are actually doing both tasks ineffectively. ~ Lorie Marrero

For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house ... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail. ~ Paul Auster

I have a thing - I call it magic - but I feel like I can write stuff down in the middle of the night and wake up and it happens. I write what I want in my journal. ~ Ester Dean

Most writers cannot afford focus groups or A/B testing, but they can ask a roommate or colleague or family member to read what they wrote and comment on it. Your reviewers needn't even be a representative sample of your intended audience. Often it's enough that they are not you. This does not mean you should implement every last suggestion they offer. Each commentator has a curse of knowledge of his own, together with hobbyhorses, blind spots, and axes to grind, and the writer cannot pander to all of them. Many academic articles contain bewildering non sequiturs and digressions that the authors stuck in at the insistence of an anonymous reviewer who had the power to reject it from the journal if they didn't comply. Good prose is never written by a committee. A writer should revise in response to a comment when it comes from more than one reader or when it makes sense to the writer herself. ~ Steven Pinker

I don't remember having one conversation with my dad in the three days I was home, but looking back at my journal, I see I wrote about him. I scrawled about how I heard him telling my mom that I needed to go back. I was unhappy; he thought the hiking was better for me.
I wonder why he told these things to my mother, nothing to me.

I wonder if overhearing his approval encouraged me to finally fly back to the trail. Maybe. Maybe my father's faith in my walk - in me - made me feel strong enough to leave. His actual words, as I wrote them in my notebook, were, "She's an adult now, she can do what she wants. It doesn't mean she's not selfish." He almost understood. ~ Aspen Matis

When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. ~ Thomas Merton

A journal takes the place of a confidant, that is, of friend or wife; it becomes a substitute for production, a substitute for country and public. It is a grief-cheating device, a mode of escape and withdrawal; but, factotum as it is, though it takes the place of everything, properly speaking it represents nothing at all ... ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

illustrated magazine: Nekrasov, 'the people's poet' (see note 15), was a contributor to Spark, an illustrated satirical journal published in Petersburg from 1859 to 1873. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The sounds of voices and laughter are like little pebbles.
All around us.
We can reach up and scoop them up in our hands.
Holding them close to us.
Saving them forever.


When I reach my journal to Grandfather, he smiled.
"Forever," he said, more to himself than to me.
He walked over to the driveway and bent down. Then he came back to where I stood. He took my hand and put a pebble there.
"I…," he said.
"Love…" He put another pebble there.
"You," he said as he placed the last one.
I stared at them for a long time, then closed my hand over them. When I looked up again, Grandfather was gone. ~ Patricia MacLachlan

Too small, too weak to get his demons behind him," Theo later wrote in his journal, full of the hard, tragic judgment children have when their parents disappoint them so severely. ~ Steven James Taylor

Be a collector of good ideas. Keep a journal. If you hear a good idea, capture it, write it down. Don't trust your memory. ~ Jim Rohn

You ought to stop everything and write the sacred-words as its flashes in your mind. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita