Old Diary Leaves Quotes

A profound impression was created by the discourses of Professor GN Chakravarti and Mrs Besant, who is said to have risen to unusual heights of eloquence, so exhilarating were the influences of the gathering. Besides those who represented our society and religions, especially Vivekananda, VR Gandhi, Dharmapala, captivated the public, who had only heard of Indian people through the malicious reports of interested missionaries, and were now astounded to see before them and hear men who represented the ideal of spirituality and human perfectibility as taught in their respective sacred writings. ~ Henry Olcott

I wanted to deny him, but that's the terrible power of a diary: it not only calls forth the person you used to be but rubs your nose in him, reminding you that not all change is evolutionary. More often than not, you didn't learn from your mistakes. You didn't get wiser, but simply older, growing from the twenty-five-year-old who got stoned and accidentally peed on his friend Katherine's kitten to the thirty-five-year-old who got drunk and peed in the sandbox at his old elementary school. "The sandbox!" my sister Amy said at the time. "Don't you realize that children have to pee in there? ~ David Sedaris

The Major's laughter boomed out again.

"And I never kept a diary in my life!" he cried. "Why there's enough cream in this situation to make a dishful of meringues. You and I, you know, the students of Tilling! The serious-minded students who do a hard day's work when all the pretty ladies have gone to bed. Often and often has old--I mean has that fine woman, Miss Mapp, told me that I work too hard at night! Recommended me to get earlier to bed, and do my work between six and eight in the morning! Six and eight in the morning! That's a queer time of day to recommend an old campaigner to be awake at! Often she's talked to you, too, I bet my hat, about sitting up late and exhausting the nervous faculties."

Major Flint choked and laughed and inhaled tobacco smoke till he got purple in the face.

"And you sitting up one side of the street," he gasped, "pretending to be interested in Roman roads, and me on the other pulling a long face over my diaries, and neither of us with a Roman road or a diary to our names. Let's have an end to such unsociable arrangements, old friend; you lining your Roman roads and the bottle to lay the dust over to me one night, and I'll bring my diaries and my peg over to you the next. Never drink alone--one of my maxims in life--if you can find someone to drink with you. And there were you within a few yards of me all the time sitting by your old solitary self, and there was I sitting by my old solitary self, and we each th ~ E.F. Benson

In your diary, you quoted old Jiko saying something about not-knowing, how not-knowing is the most intimate way, or did I just dream that?
Anyway, I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think maybe it's true, even though I don't really like uncertainty. I'd much rather 'know', but then again, not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive. ~ Ruth Ozeki

What goes in the mind is forgotten, what goes in the stomach just passes through, but that which goes in the heart is locked, like a keepsake diary, that never leaves you. ~ Anthony Liccione

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time. ~ Virginia Woolf

At the age of eight, John Quincy Adams was made the man of his house while his father, John Adams, was off doing important John Adams things for America. This would be a lot of terrifying responsibility at any time in American history, but it just so happens that, when Adams was eight years old, the *Revolutionary freaking War* was happening right outside his house. He watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from his front porch, according to his diary, worried that he might be 'butchered in cold blood, or taken and carried ... as hostages by any foraging or marauding detachment of British soldiers.' I don't have the diary I kept at age eight, but I think the only things I worried about was whether or not they'd have for dogs in the school the next day and if I had the wherewithal and clarity of purpose to collect all of the Pokemon. John Q, on the other hand, guarded his house, mother, and siblings during wartime.

This isn't to imply that eight-year-old John Quincy Adams could have beaten eight-year-old you in a fight, but to imply that eight-year-old John Quincy Adams could beat you *as an adult*. ~ Daniel O'Brien

In 2003, Meryl Streep won a career achievement César Award, the French equivalent of an Oscar. Streep's words (my translation) acknowledged the enduring interest of French audiences in women's lives and women's stories:
"I have always wanted to present stories of women who are rather difficult. Difficult to love, difficult to understand, difficult to look at sometimes. I am very cognizant that the French public is receptive to these complex and contradictory women. As an actress I have understood for a long time that lies are simple, seductive and often easy to pass off. But the truth - the truth is always very very very complicated, often unpleasant, nuanced or difficult to accept."

In France, an actress can work steadily from her teens through old age - she can start out in stories of youthful rebellion and end up, fifty years later, a screen matriarch. And in the process, her career will end up telling the story of a life - her own life, in a sense, with the films serving, as Valeria Bruni Tedeschi puts it, as a "journal intime," or diary, of one woman's emotions and growth. No wonder so many French actresses are beautiful. They're radiant with living in a cinematic culture that values them, and values them as women. And they are radiant with living in a culture - albeit one with flaws of its own - in which women are half of who decides what gets valued in the first place. Their films transcend national and language barriers and are the best vehicles for c ~ Mick LaSalle

He was a prisoner to the calendar, he realised, as we all were. He thought in little boxes that were to be ticked off and filled with things to do. Almost every day he thought back to what he had been doing ten years ago, twenty years ago, further. He lived in the past, by his diary. He was a history man, his head full of dead leaves. It was a form of reassurance, he knew. There were too many roads into the future and he didn't like not having a map for it.
("Wait") ~ Conrad Williams

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. ~ Anne Frank

Thousands of Jews in the ghetto came to their library to borrow books. Reading gave both hope and consolation to the inhabitants, as a fifteen-year-old boy, Yitzhak Rudashevski, wrote in his diary on the same day that the library celebrated its hundred thousandth book loan: 'Hundreds of people read in the ghetto. Reading has become the ghetto's greatest pleasure. Books give one a feeling of freedom; books connect us to the world. The loan of the hundred thousandth copy is something the ghetto can be proud of. ~ Anders Rydell

I know of no trunk full of old heirlooms, no felt hats or army uniforms. There are no tarnished medals or gold watches. I've stopped dreaming of discovering the old shoe box filled with the history of our family, the documents and letters that recorded our family's arrival and the historical milestones as my grandfathers left their mark on a place. There is no journal or diary. I do not know if they knew how to read or write. I could easily dismiss their existence. Their lives seem empty and still, void of emotion. I cannot tell if they wear scars. I only know of my grandfathers as broken old men. ~ David Mas Masumoto

You can't please everybody, and basically I just decided to please myself first on this record. This record is more like my diary and I am expressing myself through my music. And that's what it should be about. That's why I didn't change my name or anything. It's not about the name; it's about the music. The old saying goes that video killed the radio star and it's very true. And now I'm just letting everything revolve around the music. There is no image; I am just being myself. ~ Vanilla Ice

Wonderful?" wrote J.O. Young in his diary. "To stand cheering, crying, waving your hat and acting like a damn fool in general. No one who has spent all but 16 days of the this war as a Nip prisoner can really know what it means to see 'Old Sammy' buzzing around over camp. ~ Laura Hillenbrand

The sky is that beautiful old parchment in which the sun and the moon keep their diary. ~ Alfred Kreymborg

To start this diary rightly, it should begin on the last day of the old year, when, at breakfast, I received a letter from Mrs Hallett. She said that she had had to dismiss Lily at a moments notice, owing to her misbehaviour. We naturally supposed that a certain kind of misbehaviour was meant; a married gardener, I hazarded. Our ~ Virginia Woolf

Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. ~ Bram Stoker

For someone like me,
it is a very strange habit to write in a diary.
Not only that I have never written before,
but it strikes me that later neither I,
nor anyone else,
will care for the outpouring
of a thirteen year old schoolgirl. ~ Anne Frank

Recently I began reading my old diaries. Back to before the war. Gradually I became very depressed. The reason for that is probably that I wrote only when there were obstacles and halts to the flow of life, seldom when everything was smooth and even ... As I read I distinctly felt what a half-truth a diary presents. ~ Kathe Kollwitz

Other attempts appear as scars, weals, parentheses in conversation, absent days in his diary. But, at the same time, according to Stuart's weird sense of etiquette on such subjects, only one son in a family is allowed to kill himself, else it puts too much strain on the parents, and his brother, Gavvy, like Jacob in the Old Testament, has stolen Stuart's birthright. ~ Alexander Masters

I am eleven years old, I know, and I am not serious enough. Last night I said to myself: tomorrow I will be good. Good? I wasn't any better than I was the day before. Now here is a new month, and I haven't yet thought out how to be more sensible, how to master my impulses and my temper. I am ashamed to be so undisciplined. ~ Anais Nin

Today I bumped into you again. You seemed like that flower long forgotten in the old diary. ~ Avijeet Das

I can follow pretty much every programming language out there, I can make a two-hundred-year-old diary out of some really nasty ingredients, I can even make sense out of the instruction booklets that come with IKEA furniture, but I can*not* make heads or tails of this nonsense right here. ~ Keith R.A. DeCandido

Memories separated in time are often recalled side by side-there's an emotional connection that has nothing to do with the diary dates and everything to do with the feeling.
Remembering isn't like visiting a museum: Look! There's the long-gone object in a glass case. Memory isn't an archive. Even a simple memory is a cluster. Something that seemed so insignificant at the time suddenly becomes the key when we remember it at a particular time later. We're not liars or self-deceivers-OK, we are all liars and self-deceivers, but it's a fact that our memories change as we do.
Some memories, though, don't seem to change a all. They are sticky with pain. And even when we are not, consciously, remembering our memories, they seem to remember us. We can't shake free of their effect.
There's a great-term for that-the old present. These things happened in the past, but they're riding right up front with us every day. (245-6) ~ Jeanette Winterson

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

From the Diary of the Duchess of Roxburghe
I vow, I cannot seem to walk past a window without seeing my great-nephew carrying Miss Balfour somewhere. All great romantic poems have such scenes where the hero, in a fit of passion, sweeps the heroine off her feet. Sadly, it appears that Sin's technique is questionable.
I'm surprised that, with all of his supposed experience with the gentler sex, he doesn't realize that women do not like to be carried in a way that musses their hair and leaves them with unattractively red faces.
Sadly, yet another conversation I shall have to have with that boy. ~ Karen Hawkins

No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here's a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages
1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn't stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.
2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5.
3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on "Bright Eyes."
4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank.
5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13.
6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14.
7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15.
8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil.
9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19.
10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961.
11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936.
12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23
13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24
14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record
15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity
16) ~ Pablo

I had had a feeling of freedom because of the sudden change in my life. By comparison to what had come before, I felt immensely free. But then, once I became used to that freedom, even small tasks became more difficult. I placed constraints on myself, and filled the hours of the day. Or perhaps it was even more complicated than that. Sometimes I did exactly what I wanted to do all day - I lay on the sofa and read a book, or I typed up an old diary - and then the most terrifying sort of despair would descend on me: the very freedom I was enjoying seemed to say that what I did in my day was arbitrary, and that therefore my whole life and how I spent it was arbitrary. ~ Lydia Davis

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 po ~ Jamie Fuller

A map may become outdated when a newer version comes out, but the old one is never useless. With time a map becomes a graphic history of things as they were, and to the user a map is a friend to be treasured and a diary of past adventure. ~ Robert L. Mooers Jr.

There was a boy down at the stables." She laughed suddenly with her back comfortably nestled against Grant's chest. "Oh,Lord,he was a bit like Will, all sharp,awkward edges."
"You were crazy about him."
"I'd spend hours mucking out stalls and grooming horses just to get a glimpse of him.I wrote pages and pages about him in my diary and one very mushy poem."
"And kept it under your pillow."
"Apparently you've had a nodding aquaintance with twelve-year-old girls."
He thought of Shelby and grinned, resting his chin on the top of her head. Her hair smelled as though she'd washed it with rain-drenched wildflowers. "How long did it take you to get him to kiss you?"
She laughed. "Ten days.I thought I'd discovered the answer to the mysteries of the universe.I was a woman."
"No female's more sure of that than a twelve-year-old. ~ Nora Roberts

Exercise II.
Write a diary, imagining that you are trying to make an old person jealous. I have written an example to get you started:
Dear Diary,
I spent the morning admiring my skin elasticity.
God alive, I feel supple. ~ Joe Dunthorne

One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you'd opened your old diary. These book-memories, says Hazlitt, are "pegs and loops on which we can hang up, or from which we can take down, at pleasure, the wardrobe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, the tokens and records of our happiest hours." Or our unhappiest. Rereading forces you to spend time, at claustrophobically close range, with your earnest, anxious, pretentious, embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along. ~ Anne Fadiman

Write a diary, imagining that you are trying to make an old person jealous. ~ Joe Dunthorne

Holden considered ordering her to button up her helmet, then shrugged. She was old enough to decide for herself the relative risks and rewards of eating during a battle. ~ James S.A. Corey

In Hebrew, satan means an advocate of the alternative, the one who makes the arguments you don't know how to refute." Michelangelo looked to the old Jew, still grinning wickedly in the corner. "That satan is my best friend. ~ Adam Gidwitz

Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawingup at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through - and very good lists they were - very well chosen, and very neatly arranged - sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen - I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time; and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding. ~ Jane Austen

Okay, listen up, people," Kieran raised his voice so that it was all gravelly and impressive. I wasn't particularly impressed since we'd grown up together and I'd force-fed him mud pies when we were little, but it seemed to work on everyone else. Lia actually sighed.
Only a thirteen-year-old vampire hunter would get a crush in the middle of a vampire attack.
I was a little bit proud of her actually.
His grin widened and he nudged my shoulder companionably. "I like you, kid." (Quinn)
I tried not to groan out loud. I was as bad as Lia.
I had totally developed a crush during a vampire raid. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

Certain it is that scandal is good brisk talk, whereas praise of one's neighbor is by no means lively hearing. An acquaintance grilled, scored, devilled, and served with mustard and cayenne pepper excites the appetite; whereas a slice of cold friend with currant jelly is but a sickly, unrelishing meat. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

Every nation on Earth was attacked. Earth's casualties were 461 killed, 223 wounded, none captured, and 216 missing. Mars' casualties were 149,315 killed, 446 wounded, 11 captured, and 46,634 missing. At the end of the war, every Martian had been killed, wounded, captured, or been found missing. Not a soul was left on Mars. Not a building was left standing on Mars. The last waves of Martians to attack Earth were,-to the horror of the Earthlings who pot-shotted them, old men, women, and a few little children. The ~ Kurt Vonnegut

An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought. ~ Mignon McLaughlin

When I grow old I want to regret the things I've done, not the things I haven't done. ~ Youngblood Hawke

The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining super capitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control ... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent. ~ Larry McDonald

There is a slow-growing beauty which only comes to perfection in old age ... I have seen sweeter smiles on a lip of seventy than I ever saw on a lip of seventeen. There is the beauty of youth, and there is also the beauty of holiness - a beauty much more seldom met; and more frequently found in the arm-chair by the fire, with grandchildren around its knee, than in the ball-room or the promenade. ~ Alexander Smith

Getting older seems to but does not make us even more mortal. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A man doesn't grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul. ~ Brennan Manning

For in all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependency in their old age, and find how steep are the stairs of another man's house. Wherever they go they know themselves unwelcome. Wherever they are, they feel themselves a burden. There is no humiliation of the spirit they are not forced to endure. Their hearts are scarred all over with the stabs from cruel and callous speeches. ~ Dorothy Dix