Diarist Quotes

Anne Frank

Marie of Edinburgh, Queen of Romania

Anaïs Nin

James Boswell

John Evelyn

Etty Hillesum

Dorothy Wordsworth

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

This great bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower. I am intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness.

W. N. P. Barbellion

O Christian, never be proud of things that are so transient, injurious, and uncertain as the riches of this evil world! But set your heart on the true and durable riches of grace in Christ Jesus.

As a husband, your love for your wife has a specific goal: her holiness.

Whither am I going? To the New World. What to do? To gain honor? No, if I know my own heart. To get money? No: I am going to live to God, and to bring others so to do.

Love does not care to define and is never in a hurry to do so.

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

Colin Clark (filmmaker)

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

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.

Peace, comfort, quiet, happiness, I have found away from home. Only your own family, those nearest and dearest, can hurt you.

Mary Boykin Chesnut

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

James Lees-Milne

Yesterday, at Andillac, a little child went to heaven. If I were a little child I should like to follow it, but when one gets old, if one could help it, one would never die. Then it is that the threads that once attached us to earth become cables.

Eugénie de Guérin

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

Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.

There is a certain strong sense of inner conviction that strikes, with a pang as that of birth, through the very soul, and which is experienced but once or twice in a lifetime.

E. M. Delafield

Our diversion was dancing (or jumping about) without a violin or any music, singing of foolish and bawdy healths and more such-like stupidity, and drinking all the time as fast as could be poured down; and the parson of the parish was one amongst the mixed multitude, all the time.

This day I bestowed too much time in the garden, and thereby was worse able to perform spiritual duties.

It is a fine thing to be out on the hills alone. A man can hardly be a beast or a fool alone on a great mountain.

Francis Kilvert

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

Violet Trefusis

I think one of the dullest things in the world is a letter filled with apologies for not writing sooner.

Dorothy Wordsworth

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.

To be entirely happy in marriage, the same thing must be important to both.

Marie of Edinburgh, Queen of Romania

Though I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity.

I am utterly against those confused Olios, into which men put almost all kinds of meats and Roots.

Melancholy cannot be clearly proved to others, so it is better to be silent about it.