Susan Sontag, from As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980; February 17th, 1970
Text ID: I don't feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall—like seeking love in a whorehouse.
Susan Sontag, from “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963″
““I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.”
— Anaïs Nin, Diaries
“We write to heighten our own awareness of life, we write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. […] When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking, I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.”
— Anaïs Nin
“We write to heighten our own awareness of life, we write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. […] When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking, I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.”
— Anaïs Nin
“how can the soul keep from flying to fragments – disintegrating, in one wild dispersal?”
— Sylvia Plath, on August 27, from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 28 August 1957 – 14 October 1958
— Vera Nazarian, Dreams of the Compass Rose
— Leila Sales
— Franz Kafka
“Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It’s all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait. Everything is a diary.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Diary
Albert Camus, from a notebook entry featured in Notebooks (1951-1959)
Etty Hillesum, fom a diary entry featured in An Interrupted Life: the Diaries, 1941-1943 and Letters from Westerbork
“…the scent of lavender comes to me, awakens me, and enlivens my heart. The landscape that I recognize nourishes me again and I arrive happy. I feel at once sheltered and pacified.”
— Albert Camus, from a notebook entry featured in Notebooks (1951-1959)
Katherine Mansfield, from a diary entry featured in “The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield,”
