Quotes by Women Diarists

Anne Frank

Marie of Edinburgh, Queen of Romania

Anaïs Nin

Etty Hillesum

Dorothy Wordsworth

Violet Trefusis

Mary Boykin Chesnut

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.

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

Marie of Edinburgh, Queen of Romania

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

Mary Boykin Chesnut

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

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

Dorothy Wordsworth

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

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

Violet Trefusis

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.

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

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

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