Words to Live By: Journals & Diaries

Presented without comment, here is a collection of quotes on the topic of keeping journals/diaries. 

But I believe in myself, and there is always my world behind the curtain.

from Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery

Nevertheless, there are signs that we are intent 

as never before on trying to puzzle out, 

to live by, our own particular self. 

Der Mensch muss frei sein--free disentangled, single. 

It is not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography, 

especially for memories of earliest childhood, 

is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self 

which is continuous and permanent; 

which, untouched by all we acquire and all we shed, 

pushes a green spear through the dead leaves 

and through the mould, thrusts a scaled bud 

through years of darkness until, one day, 

the light discovers it and shakes the flower free and--

we are alive--we are flowering for our moment upon the earth? 

This is the moment which, after all, we live for--

the moment of direct feeling 

when we are most ourselves and least personal.

Katherine Mansfield 

Writing is more human than painting.

Emily Carr

Although I write very little, I have just discovered 

a new justification of my Journal, a definite use for it. 

I have discovered that I owe to it much

 that I am and much of the success of my life. 

I owe to it what some people owe to psychology: 

knowledge of myself, extreme consciousness 

of what in others is vague and unconscious, 

a knowledge of my desires, of my weaknesses, 

of my dreams, of my talents. 

There is more than that to psychology, 

but in writing about it I am entering an unfamiliar world.

Anaïs Nin 

Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead 

and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. 

The mind makes and makes, spinning its web. 

Sylvia Plath

Images: all are pictures taken by me at Nose Hill Park in Calgary. Calgary is the traditional territories of the 

Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Îyâxe Nakoda Nations, the Métis Nation (Region 3).