Diary Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Diary. Here they are! All 100 of them:

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
A diary with no drawings of me in it? Where are the torrid fantasies? The romance covers?
Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
Anaïs Nin (Incest: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932-1934)
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934)
I've found that there is always some beauty left -- in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you.
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
No one has ever become poor by giving.
Anne Frank (diary of Anne Frank: the play)
So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them." (Initiation)
Sylvia Plath (Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts)
I don't think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.
Anaïs Nin (Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932)
If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.
Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian)
I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.
Anaïs Nin
Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit.
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
I live for coincidences. They briefly give to me the illusion or the hope that there's a pattern to my life, and if there's a pattern, then maybe I'm moving toward some kind of destiny where it's all explained.
Jonathan Ames (My Less Than Secret Life: A Diary, Fiction, Essays)
It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree.
Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary (Bridget Jones, #1))
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974)
Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.
Isabelle Eberhardt (The Nomad: Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt)
People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but that doesn't stop you from having your own opinion.
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
The fact is, I love him. He's the boy I want and one day he'll be MINE.
Meg Cabot (Princess in Training (The Princess Diaries, #6))
Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.
Samuel Pepys (The Diary of Samuel Pepys)
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934)
Whoever is happy will make others happy.
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired.
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.
Anne Frank (The Diary of Anne Frank)
I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.
Virginia Woolf (A Writer's Diary)
Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.
Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian)
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.
Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934)
your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
Where there's hope, there's life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
Mark Twain (The Diaries of Adam & Eve: Translated by Mark Twain)
Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.
Anaïs Nin (Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932)
Niall: Help! Louis: Did anyone hear that? Niall: Help!! Louis: SOMEBODY NEEDS HELP! RAAH! (Pulls open shirt and has Superman shirt underneath) Superman is here!!
Louis Tomlinson
To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.
Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934)
I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self.
Anaïs Nin
Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with chances of betrayal.
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve.
David Sedaris
Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving.
Anaïs Nin (Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932)
Living is a horizontal fall.
Jean Cocteau (Opium: The Diary of His Cure)
Dear Diary, Oh, it's all too much to explain and you wouldn't believe it anyway. I'm going to bed. Bonnie
L.J. Smith (Dark Reunion (The Vampire Diaries, #4))
What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.
Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
Katherine," he said. He was still smiling. "Yes." She leaned closer. "Katherine..." "Yes, Damon?" "Go to hell.
L.J. Smith (The Fury / Dark Reunion (The Vampire Diaries, #3-4))
You can't expect everyone to have the same dedication as you.
Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Diary of a Wimpy Kid, #1))
I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934)
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
Why do people always assume that volume will succeed when logic won’t? - Damon
L.J. Smith (Nightfall (The Vampire Diaries: The Return, #1))
I want to make my own discoveries…….penetrate the evil which attracts me
Anaïs Nin (Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932)
I think a lot, but I don't say much.
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.
Hunter S. Thompson (The Rum Diary)
A quiet conscience makes one strong!
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.
Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary (Bridget Jones, #1))
I'm awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.
Anaïs Nin (Fire: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937)
I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,' I said. 'By Black and White. By Indian and White. But I know this isn't true. The world is only broken into two tribes: the people who are assholes and the people who are not.
Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian)
You can be lonely even when you are loved by many people, since you are still not anybody's one and only.
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
I'll be famous one day, but for now I'm stuck in middle school with a bunch of morons." - Greg Heffley,
Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Diary of a Wimpy Kid, #1))
What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.
Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934)
Just for the record, the weather today is bitter with occasional fits of jealous rage.
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
Can officially confirm that the way to a man's heart these days is not through beauty, food, sex, or alluringness of character, but merely the ability to seem not very interested in him.
Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary (Bridget Jones, #1))
Women should be respected as well! Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn't women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?...Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together!
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
Alberto Manguel (A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books)
But feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life.
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
As long as this exists, this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
I hope the exit is joyful and i hope never to return.
Frida Kahlo
This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.
Franz Kafka (Diaries, 1910-1923)
She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.
Julia Quinn (The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever (Bevelstoke, #1))
Evil will never find peace. It may triumph, but it will never find peace.
L.J. Smith (The Awakening (The Vampire Diaries, #1))
The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar)
There's only one rule you need to remember: laugh at everything and forget everybody else! It sounds egotistical, but it's actually the only cure for those suffering from self-pity.
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
If there's one thing I learned from Rodrick, it's to set people's expectations real low so you end up surprising them by practically doing nothing at all.
Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Diary of a Wimpy Kid, #1))
In chaos, there is fertility.
Anaïs Nin
You're talking!" "I know I am." "And making sense!" "Thank you kindly." "And in sentences!" "I've noticed." - Stefan and Elena
L.J. Smith (Nightfall (The Vampire Diaries: The Return, #1))
The name is Salvatore. As in savior.
L.J. Smith (The Awakening / The Struggle (The Vampire Diaries, #1-2))
April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.
Franz Kafka (Diaries, 1910-1923)
People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.
Franz Kafka (Diaries, 1910-1923)
Although I'm only fourteen, I know quite well what I want, I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child, I feel quite indepedent of anyone.
Anne Frank (The Diary of Anne Frank)
Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she is bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child rearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to be. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment man rests inside of her.
Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934)
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.
Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934)
Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.
Hunter S. Thompson (The Rum Diary)
Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgement that something is more important than fear; The brave may not live forever but the cautious do not live at all.
Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries (The Princess Diaries, #1))
I wish to go on living even after my death.
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.
Virginia Woolf (Selected Diaries)
For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love.
Anaïs Nin (Fire: From A Journal of Love - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1934-1937))
Everyone's in their own personal coma.
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.
Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian)
Selling my soul would be a lot easier if I could just find it.
Nikki Sixx (The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star)
I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits
Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934)
I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That's right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent.
Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian)
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." I really hate this expression. I bet fish would totally want bicycles.
Meg Cabot (Princess on the Brink (The Princess Diaries, #8))
The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.
Courtney Love (Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love)
I will not fall for any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobics, people with girlfriends or wives, misogynists, megalomanics, chauvists, emotional fuckwits or freeloaders, perverts.
Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary (Bridget Jones, #1))
Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.
Anaïs Nin (Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932)
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.
Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.
Stephen Fry
Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you're keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls...are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.
James Patterson (Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas)
No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages 1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5. 3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.” 4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank. 5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13. 6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14. 7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15. 8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil. 9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19. 10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961. 11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936. 12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23 13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24 14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record 15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity 16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 28 18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world 19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter 20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind 22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest 23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight 26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions. 27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon. 28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas 30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger 31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States 32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out. 33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out. 35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa. 36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president. 37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels. 38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat". 40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived 41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise 42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out 43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US 44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats 45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President
Pablo
The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? No, thank you,' he will think. 'Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.
Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
Do you know what I would answer to someone who asked me for a description of myself, in a hurry? This: ?? !! For indeed my life is a perpetual question mark--my thirst for books, my observations of people, all tend to satisfy a great, overwhelming desire to know, to understand, to find an answer to a million questions. And gradually the answers are revealed, many things are explained, and above all, many things are given names and described, and my restlessness is subdued. Then I become an exclamatory person, clapping my hands to the immense surprises the world holds for me, and falling from one ecstasy into another. I have the habit of peeping and prying and listening and seeking--passionate curiosity and expectation. But I have also the habit of being surprised, the habit of being filled with wonder and satisfaction each time I stumble on some wondrous thing. The first habit could make me a philosopher or a cynic or perhaps a humorist. But the other habit destroys all the delicate foundations, and I find each day that I am still...only a Woman!
Anaïs Nin (The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 2: 1920-1923)
When they bombed Hiroshima, the explosion formed a mini-supernova, so every living animal, human or plant that received direct contact with the rays from that sun was instantly turned to ash. And what was left of the city soon followed. The long-lasting damage of nuclear radiation caused an entire city and its population to turn into powder. When I was born, my mom says I looked around the whole hospital room with a stare that said, "This? I've done this before." She says I have old eyes. When my Grandpa Genji died, I was only five years old, but I took my mom by the hand and told her, "Don't worry, he'll come back as a baby." And yet, for someone who's apparently done this already, I still haven't figured anything out yet. My knees still buckle every time I get on a stage. My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons mixed into my poetry, and it still always tastes funny in my mouth. But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page. So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed. My parents named me Sarah, which is a biblical name. In the original story God told Sarah she could do something impossible and she laughed, because the first Sarah, she didn't know what to do with impossible. And me? Well, neither do I, but I see the impossible every day. Impossible is trying to connect in this world, trying to hold onto others while things are blowing up around you, knowing that while you're speaking, they aren't just waiting for their turn to talk -- they hear you. They feel exactly what you feel at the same time that you feel it. It's what I strive for every time I open my mouth -- that impossible connection. There's this piece of wall in Hiroshima that was completely burnt black by the radiation. But on the front step, a person who was sitting there blocked the rays from hitting the stone. The only thing left now is a permanent shadow of positive light. After the A bomb, specialists said it would take 75 years for the radiation damaged soil of Hiroshima City to ever grow anything again. But that spring, there were new buds popping up from the earth. When I meet you, in that moment, I'm no longer a part of your future. I start quickly becoming part of your past. But in that instant, I get to share your present. And you, you get to share mine. And that is the greatest present of all. So if you tell me I can do the impossible, I'll probably laugh at you. I don't know if I can change the world yet, because I don't know that much about it -- and I don't know that much about reincarnation either, but if you make me laugh hard enough, sometimes I forget what century I'm in. This isn't my first time here. This isn't my last time here. These aren't the last words I'll share. But just in case, I'm trying my hardest to get it right this time around.
Sarah Kay