“Writing a journal means that facing your ocean, you are afraid to swim across it,” wrote George Sand, “so you attempt to drink it drop by drop.”

The notebook is akin to the author’s other brain, the brain that has the freedom to think and muse freely with total recall.

They’re photographs of my mind and they help me make a kind of sense of my development as a person as well as of my development as a writer.

The journal is a place where you can shed the mask you wear during the course of your day.

I have long believed Keats’s assertion, and later restatements of it by other writers, that writing is selfmaking.

The notebook is not an end, but a means.

A journal can be a veritable treasure chest of thoughts and anecdotes. It is not only a place to collect ideas, though, but a place to practice writing and overcome writer’s block.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward. Søren Kierkegaard, quoted in Howard V. Horg, The Essential Kierkegaard (2000)

the importance of journal keeping as a powerful tool for creative expression and self-healing, and a way to help solidify thoughts in both one’s personal and literary life.