20th-century Diarist Quotes

Anne Frank

Anaïs Nin

Etty Hillesum

Violet Trefusis

Opal Whiteley

How wonderful it is that no one has to wait, but can start right now to gradually change the world!

I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.

Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.

Across my life only one word will be written: "waste" - waste of love, waste of talent, waste of enterprise.

Violet Trefusis

He worked with her as she was and not as he wanted her to be.

Colin Clark (filmmaker)

The matter of making christening robes for caterpillars, it is not a difficult one; the difficulty is to get a frisky caterpillar to keep still while one is putting on his christening robe. And then it is a problem to keep it on, after one does get it on. I do have much troubles with caterpillars crawling out of their christening robes after I do get them on.

It is a purely relative matter where one draws the plimsoll-line of condemnation, and... if you find the whole of humanity falls below it you have simply made a mistake and drawn it too high. And are probably below it yourself.

Frances Partridge

He was a provocative, aggressive, contrary old man, enunciating his theories in clipped tones as though they were papal encyclicals.

James Lees-Milne