Lauren
@missmarple
Lauren
I believe that during the past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea
Maria Popova • Virginia Woolf on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary
Another practical sense of self improvement
smart women almost always wear black in Cuba,” a fashion hint without much potential for practical application. And does not the relevance of these notes seem marginal at best?
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
I used to do this a lot as a child. White my own collections of ‘important facts’ so I was not going to lose them
as Virginia Woolf herself remarks somewhere in these diaries, one gets into the habit of recording one particular kind of mood — irritation or misery, say — and of not writing one’s diary when one is feeling the opposite. The portrait is therefore from the start unbalanced, and, if someone then deliberately removes another characteristic, it may... See more
Maria Popova • Virginia Woolf on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary
We’re an unreliable narrator of our own lives, even if we are only narrating them to ourselves
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
Nor can one let the pen write without guidance; for fear of becoming slack and untidy. . . .
Maria Popova • Virginia Woolf on the Creative Benefits of Keeping a Diary
How it felt to me : that is getting closer to the truth about a note book.
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly com pulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only acciden tally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
Joan Didion - why she feels the urge to write things down?
It all comes back. Even that recipe for sauerkraut: even that brings it back. I was on Fire Island when I first made that sauerkraut, and it was raining, and we drank a lot of bourbon and ate the sauerkraut and went to bed at ten, and I listened to the rain and the Atlantic and felt safe. I made the sauerkraut again last night and it did not make... See more
Joan Didion • On Keeping A Notebook
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.