Selected Diaries Quotes

Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I'm never not thinking of you.

Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.

I finally said, "Let's put it this way: I'd rather lose you than stop my shots.""You mean that chemical is more important to you than I am?""No, I am more important to me than you are.

In case you ever foolishly forget: I am never not thinking of you.

I wanna look like what I am but don't know what someone like me looks like. I mean, when people look at me I want them to think-- there's one of those people that reasons, that is a philosopher, that has their own interpretation of happiness. That's what I am.

A big fear of mine is that I will die before the gender professionals acknowledge that someone like me exists, and then I really won't exist to prove them wrong.

It really hasn't hit me that I am about to die. I see the grief around me, but inside I feel serene and a certain kind of peace. My whole life I've wanted to be a gay man and it's kind of an honor to die from the gay men's disease.

I don't even know if there was anyone that's ever felt as I do.. how they coped, what they did...how do I find out what someone like me does?

A wet day. And I am glad of the rain, because I have talked too much.

He said my ambiguity was one of the few things that made me "interesting." Afterwards I cried while talking with Charles about it, saying I don't want to be interesting, I want to be happy.

I don't know. I love the idea of democracy, the hope, yes, I love that. I couldn't live without that. But the country? You mean the thing on the map, lines, everything inside the lines is good and nothing outside them matters? How can an adult love such a childish idea?

The NELLIE, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide. The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

What you call your lies are fiction and myths. The art of creating a disguise can be as beautiful as the creation of a painting… I created a woman for my artist life, bold, gay, courageous, generous, fearless; and another to please my father, a clear-sighted woman with a love of beauty, harmony, and self-discipline, critical and selective; and still another who lives in chaos, embraces the weak and the stumbling and the confused.

Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. The artist is the only one who knows the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it, he hopes to impose this particular vision and share it with others. When the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others. We also write to heighten our own awareness of life, we write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth, we write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write. Because our culture has no use for any of that. When I don't write I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.

The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing a future can be, I think.

You are friendly and outgoing, and you love people. You will most enjoy writing a blog. Select a fab online ID and share your exciting, DIVALICIOUS life with your friends.

In a lot of ways I think the problem is I spend too much time seeing myself though other people's eyes and not really being in my body and enjoying myself and relaxing in my image.

Before entering our room we had to remove our shoes. Here Ken and myself made what I expected to be the first of many faux pas. After taking our shoes off, we noticed some oriental style slippers nearby and presumed that we ought to put these on in true Japanese style. Grumbling that they were all too small, we eventually selected two pairs and were tottering to our room when one of the Japanese ‘attendants’ – it wouldn’t be quite right to call them ‘waitresses’ – stopped us excitedly and told us to take off the shoes. Then we realised the awful truth – that they belonged to people already eating there.

I lied. I lied. I lied. I lied deliberately, knowingly, well. She lied. She is a liar. She is an intellectual too! She is a lie. And a coward, afraid.

This life-and-death matter just doesn’t seem to have answers.

Dear Diary, I wish I had a boy to take me skating and to talk to. But I'm too young. I wish I'd grow up. This year I'm counting on my period. Well good night! I hope we become good friends.

It's not that I've changed, but that everyone else has changed toward me, just because they think I'm male now. And I feel less self-conscious because of that. I haven't changed inside at all.

I just don’t think I write enough on how much I enjoy life lately. This change, this SEX CHANGE that is supposed to be so weird, has in reality made me feel LESS weird. I can relax + laugh + not THINK before I say or do something + it all comes out right + I’m relaxed + I think, “My God, if they only knew…

The Batman movie theater killer, James Holmes, initially considered attacking an airport. In his diary, which was released in 2015, he explained his decision against targeting the airport because of “substantial security.”23 He then selected the only theater within twenty minutes of his apartment that banned permitted concealed handguns.

You'd die of shame at the thought of showing anyone what you'd written. Somebody somewhere says that 'the urge to preserve is the basis of all art'. Unaware of this thought, you keep a diary. You keep it not only because it gratifies your urge to sling words around, everyday with impunity, but because without it, you will lose your life, ts detail will leak away into the sand and be gone forever.

The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth There was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone’s The Bloomsbury Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf ’s writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis. James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian ‘moment’ in terms of ‘short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf ’s use of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough’. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner’s 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962). The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962); translated by Jean Stewart, 1965) was the first full-length study ofWoolf ’s oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.’ This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf ’s feminism, either. his heavy use of extracts from A Writer’s Diary. He lays great emphasis on subjectivism in Woolf ’s writing, and draws attention to her interest in the subjective experience of ‘the moment.’ Despite his philosophical apparatus, Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insists that Woolf has indeed ‘no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life, not ideology’. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for him a ‘purely psychological’ writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist and historicist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjective and the psychological: ‘To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and

that I had been selected to receive an award known as the Medaglia de Grifone, or Christopher Columbus medal, given every year for “outstanding contributions to sea travel.” Admiral Rickover had been the recipient just the year before. Bonny and I traveled to Genoa, Italy, the birthplace and boyhood home of Columbus. On October 12, 1958, Columbus Day, we attended the black-tie awards ceremony. I accepted on behalf of everyone on board Nautilus and emphasized that “no dramatic development in the history of modern man would be possible without the labor and genius of those who have gone before

During these first days, when, in the disarray of mind and senses which was the consequence of the iniquitous sentence passed on me, I had resolved to kill myself, my dear wife, with her undaunted devotion and courage, made me realize that it is because I am innocent that I have not the right to abandon her or wilfully to desert my post.

How heavy must the responsibility weigh on those others who, in torturing an individual, are also abusing the confidence of an entire nation!

My little Pierre is now nearly five years old. He is quite a big boy. I used to wait with impatience for the time when I could take him with me and talk with him, opening his young mind, instilling into him the love of beauty and truth, and helping fashion for him so lofty a soul that the ugliness of life could not degrade it.

Ah, human nature with its passions and hatreds, with its moral hideousness! Ah, men, to whom, compared with their selfish interests, all else matters little! Justice is a good thing - when there is plenty of time and nobody is inconvenienced!

I shall struggle against the decline of body and brain and heart so long as a shadow of force is left me, so long as they leave me a spark of life. I must see the end of this dark tragedy.

. . . for whatever the will and energy of a man may be, human strength has a limit, and this limit had been reached.

that everyone else has probably completely forgotten the incident, but I think it’s going to take quite a while for me to get over it. For some reason though, I suspect that one particular girl in our class had something to do with it all. Call it gut instinct or intuition, but I have a sneaking suspicion that somehow she was involved. Thinking back before that doomed day, life had been pretty good. My best friend, Millie and I had auditioned for the school musical and we were both selected for major roles. Being in grade seven gave us an advantage over the younger kids, that and of course the fact that we were both dancers. The best part was that we’d also been asked to choreograph sections of the performance and this was a huge honor. Miss Sheldon, the performing arts teacher who was in charge of the production, had given us the responsibility of coming up with some routines and teaching the other kids the dance moves they needed to learn. We were so excited about this, especially because we’d been left in charge. Miss Sheldon is the coolest teacher ever!

I had seen enough of him to realize his impetuous nature, his gambler’s spirit, and his determination to follow his own selected path at all costs, to realize fully what I was faced with.

SELECT

dinner. The mentors had said that they were going to select different kids from

They were outsiders here in Amsterdam, and when some people are less than others, and only a select few have rights, anyone who doesn’t belong can never be safe.

Finally, we were all able to select surfboards, pay our rental fee,

The Harada Method Steps Set Your Long-Term Goal Set Milestone Goals Believe in Yourself Determine Service to Others Find Your Purpose Analyze Yourself Create Your 64-Chart with Eight Areas to Achieve Your Goal Task Start Dates Select 10 Tasks to Start Select 10 Routines Determine Your Resource Needs Select Support People Use Your Routine Check Sheet Keep a Daily Diary Write Affirmations Achieve Self-Reliance

The American psychologist Elliot Aronson, who studied this phenomenon, famously assembled a discussion group of pompous, dull people. Some of the participants were made to endure an arduous selection process; others were allowed to join immediately, without expending any effort. Those who were given the runaround reported enjoying the group far more than the ones who were simply let in. Aronson explained what was happening here: whenever we’ve invested time, money or energy into something and it ends up being a complete waste of time, this creates dissonance, which we try to reduce by finding ways of justifying our bad decision. Aronson’s participants focused unconsciously on what might be interesting, or at least bearable, about being part of a deliberately boring group. The people who had invested very little effort in joining therefore had less dissonance to reduce, and more readily admitted what a waste of time it had been.

The last game we played was another suggestion of Millie’s called...Truth or Dare Balloons. Millie and I had so much fun thinking up Truth or Dare options which we wrote on small pieces of paper and then slipped inside a heap of balloons before inflating them. To play the game, we needed some fun music so Jack took care of that by selecting some upbeat songs from the playlist on his phone. Everyone had to be dancing while one balloon was passed around the group by bumping it towards each other. If someone allowed the balloon to hit the floor, that person had to pop the balloon and then complete the truth or dare inside it. To

Mary Vial Holyoke was the daughter of a Boston merchant and the wife of a Salem gentleman, Edward Augustus Holyoke, a casual versifier and serious physician who was a member of the town’s economic and intellectual elite.3 The Holyokes enjoyed the barbecues, dances, teas, and “turtles” of the Essex County gentry, yet each of the four major housekeeping roles is clearly apparent in Mary’s diary, as this selection of entries from the 1760s shows: Service and maintenance: “Washed.” “Ironed.” “Scoured pewter.” “Scowered rooms.” “Scoured furniture Brasses & put up the Chintz bed & hung pictures.” “Burnt 5 Chimnies.” “Opened cask of Biscuit.” “Began a Barrel of flour.” “Began upon 22 lb. of chocolate.” “Dressed a Calves Head turtle fashion.” Agriculture: “Sowd sweet marjoram.” “Sowed pease.

I don't even know if there was anyone that's ever felt as I do.. how they coped, what they did...how do I find out what someone like me does?

Sometimes I worry (and I know I worry too much, too seriously) that I will have the same self-doubts and uneasiness as a man as I have a woman. I worry that I will fail to find the happiness I think I will. But as I wash myself and prepare for this surgery, when I buy my new shirts and look at my breasts and think they are sexy (!), I know I'll come out of this a better person.

For the first half of 7th grade, I was so distracted by a new middle school and a huge batch of new classmates and friends that I barely noticed that I hadn’t worked much. I was grateful not to be working, in fact, because I didn’t want to miss a minute of my new life. I moved from class to class, mixing with different kids every period. I had eight teachers instead of one, a whole range of new subjects to dig into, like chemistry and Spanish. And then there was a brand-new selection of boys. The student body was almost 10 times the size of my old school.