33 Diary Quotes To Cherish

In a world overflowing with fleeting moments and digital noise, a diary remains a sanctuary for personal reflection and cherished memories. The pages of a diary have long been a trusted companion for writers, dreamers, and thinkers alike. Within this intimate space, thoughts and emotions find pure expression, free from the constraints of time and societal expectations. Today, we celebrate the timeless tradition of diarizing with a curated collection of the top 33 diary quotes. Whether you're a seasoned journaler or looking for inspiration to start, these quotes will ignite your passion for capturing life's beautiful intricacies. Dive in and let these words inspire you to cherish and document your personal journey.

1. “The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.” - Virginia Woolf

2. “ The following year the house was substantially remodeled, and the conservatory removed. As the walls of the now crumbling wall were being torn down, one of the workmen chanced upon a small leatherbound book that had apparently been concealed behind a loose brick or in a crevice in the wall. By this time Emily Dickinson was a household name in Amherst. It happened that this carpenter was a lover of poetry- and hers in particular- and when he opened the little book and realized that that he had found her diary, he was “seized with a violent trembling,” as he later told his grandson. Both electrified and terrified by the discovery, he hid the book in his lunch bucket until the workday ended and then took it home. He told himself that after he had read and savored every page, he would turn the diary over to someone who would know how to best share it with the public. But as he read, he fell more and more deeply under the poet’s spell and began to imagine that he was her confidant. He convinced himself that in his new role he was no longer obliged to give up the diary. Finally, having brushed away the light taps of conscience, he hid the book at the back of an oak chest in his bedroom, from which he would draw it out periodically over the course of the next sixty-four years until he had virtually memorized its contents. Even his family never knew of its existence. Shortly before his death in 1980 at the age of eighty-nine, the old man finally showed his most prized possession to his grandson (his only son having preceded him in death), confessing that his delight in it had always been tempered by a nagging guilt and asking that the young man now attempt to atone for his grandfather’s sin. The grandson, however, having inherited both the old man’s passion for poetry and his tendency towards paralysis of conscience, and he readily succumbed to the temptation to hold onto the diary indefinitely while trying to decide what ought to be done with it.” - Jamie Fuller

3. “Morning: Slept.Afternoon: Slept.Evening: Ate grass.Night: Ate grass. Decided grass is boring. Scratched. Hard to reach the itchy bits.Slept.” - Jackie French

4. “In chaos, there is fertility.” - Anais Nin

5. “You may want to keep a commonplace book which is a notebook where you can copy parts of books you think are in code, or take notes on a series of events you may have observed that are suspicious, unfortunate, or very dull. Keep your commonplace book in a safe place, such as underneath your bed, or at a nearby dairy.” - Lemony Snicket

6. “For obvious reasons, I never told you about my notebook, with a cover as green as mansions long ago, which I use as a commonplace book, a phrase which here means 'place where I have collected passages from some of the most important books I have read.” - Lemony Snicket

7. “Selling my soul would be a lot easier if I could just find it.” - Nikki Sixx

8. “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” - Pablo Picasso

9. “The poets and philosophers I once loved had it wrong. Death does not come to us all, nor does the passage of time dim our memories and reduce our bodies to dust. Because while I was considered dead, and a headstone had been engraved with my name, in truth my life was just beginning.” - L.J. Smith

10. “Each new day is a blank page in the diary of your life. The secret of success is in turning that diary into the best story you possibly can.” - Douglas Pagels

11. “A diary with no drawings of me in it? Where are the torrid fantasies? The romance covers?” - Cassandra Clare

12. “The saddest line you scraped in your diary was not that you cried but those moments when we both shared smile.” - Santosh Kalwar

13. “Joshie has always told Post Human Services Staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were because every moment, our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day, we transfer into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox. But not me. I am still a facsimile of my early childhood. I am still looking for a loving dad to lift me up and brush the sand off my ass and to hear English, calm and hurtless, fall off his lips.” - Gary Shteyngart

14. “Everyone thinks I'm showing off when I talk, ridiculous when I'm silent, insolent when I answer, cunning when I have a good idea, lazy when I'm tired, selfish when I eat one bite more than I should.” - Anne Frank

15. “If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it?” - S. Kelley Harrell

16. “It's an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I - nor for that matter anyone else - will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old school girl.” - Anne Frank

17. “It (politician) wants to separate them. And to do so it has chosen the worst, blackest pencil of all - the pencil of war, which spells only misery and death.” - Zlata Filipovic

18. “All the beautiful waitresses existed like eternal responsibilities.” - Spalding Gray

19. “How do we know that our life really happened and that we are not simply accumulating details, making it all up as we go along?” - Rachel Klein

20. “I laughed when I read about being born with two hearts, one of which is devoted only to destroying humanity.” - Rachel Klein

21. “I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more...” - Sylvia Plath

22. “Please read my diary, look through my things and figure me out.” - Kurt Cobain

23. “The impression that what is extraordinary is real, and that the real is the extraordinary.” - Hélène Berr

24. “Now that everybody thinks he looks a little Slavic, it annoys me. I don't want that to be the reason I find him charming. I found him charming for no reason, because he is who he is.” - Hélène Berr

25. “Who else but me is ever going to read these letters?” - Anne Frank

26. “Dear Diary,My pen is finally touching your pages. It is time to tell our story. Our story began in China and now it continues in America. I want to write about our old life and I want to write about our life now. I will write it all down with hopes that somehow I can connect the two worlds I have lived in. Right now those worlds seem so far apart.” - Diane René Christian

27. “Dear Diary,We flew to the other side of the world, and I never stopped holding you close to my chest. You were empty and so was I. My only friend in the world. The only one who understood where I began and where I was going. We flew together and everything we knew before was gone.” - Diane René Christian

28. “Today there's no one here, so I find a rock and open my notebookfilled with letters to Lucca,reading them,noticing how the lettersdecreased in frequencyover the past couple of months.When i started,shortly after he died,I wrote them every day.I hurt so bad, I wanted to scream,but I couldn't,so my words on the pagebecame a diary of the pain.” - Lisa Schroeder

29. “One minute you're closer to someone than anyone in the whole world, next minute they need only to say the words 'time apart', 'serious talk' or 'maybe you...' and you're never going to see them again and will have to spend the next six months having imaginary conversations in which they beg to come back, and bursting into tears at the sight of their toothbrush.” - Helen Fielding

30. “Issues are like tissues. You pull one out and another appears!” - Gary Goldstein

31. “I need to make myself strong on the inside instead of what is on the outside. I know all of this, but why can’t I put any of it into action? I guess that’s why I am in this place.” - Piper Caleb

32. “Maybe we choose to stay in a constant state of ignorance as a protective instinct — maybe I was just in denial. I just don’t get how you can be completely in love with someone one day, and then all of a sudden you just aren’t. I will never forget that day...the day where I became numb.” - Piper Caleb

33. “Övgüler yerindeydi de, yerinde olmayan sinirlerimdi.” - Virginia Woolf