Redraft the self, Regain the past.
Imagine the future.
"I
have found so many sides of myself in the diaries of others. I would like it if I someday reflect future readers to themselves,
provide them with examples, warnings, courage, and amusement. In these unedited glimpses of the self in others, of others
in the self, is another of the covenants posterity makes with the day-to-day."
- Gail Goodwin
"I write entirely to find out what I'm
thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means."
- Joan Didion
"A person's work is nothing but a long
journey to recover, through the detours of art, the two or three simple and great images which first gained access to their
hearts."
- Albert Camus
"To write about one's life
is to live it twice, and the second living is both spiritual and historical, for a memoir reaches deep within the
personality as it seeks its narrative form."
- Patricia Hampl
"Two or three things I know for sure;
and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you make."
- Dorothy Allison
"I never travel without my diary. One
should always have something sensational to read in the train."
- Oscar Wilde
"Seeing is of course very much a matter
of verbalization Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see... It's all a matter of
keeping my eyes open."
- Annie Dillard
"Having to stare... not getting the point
at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it."
- Flannery O'Connor
"Writing is one way of discovering sequence
in experience... Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves...
Experiences... connect and are identified as a larger shape."
- Eudora Welty
"Getting access to that interior life
is a kind of... archaeology: on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what
remains were left behind and you reconstruct the world.."
- Toni Morrison
"The journal is the ideal place of refuge
for the inner self because it constitutes a counterworld: a world to balance the other."
- Joyce Carol Oates
"It's very strange, but the mere act of
writing anything is a help. It seems to speed one on one's way."
- Katherine Mansfield
"There looms ahead of me the shadow of
some kind of form which the diary might attain. I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose,
drifting material of life; finding another use for it.
- Virginia Woolf
"Memory is a living thing-- it too is
in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins and lives-- the old and the young, the past and the present,
the living and the dead."
- Eudora Welty
"If the information age has spawned a
hunger for connection (and privacy), so, too, a need for the quickest way to access interior life. Here at the turn of a new
millennium, there are no inhibitions for thousands who post diary entries daily on the Internet, on sites like Open Pages
and Metajournals."
- Alexandra Johnson, author
of Leaving a Trace: The Art of Transforming a Life into Stories.
