"The good diarist writes either for himself..." - Quote by Virginia Woolf
The good diarist writes either for himself alone or for a posterity so distant that it can safely hear every secret and justly weigh every motive. For such an audience there is need neither of affectation nor of restraint. Sincerity is what they ask, detail, and volume; skill with the pen comes in conveniently, but brilliance is not necessary; genius is a hindrance even; and should you know your business and do it manfully, posterity will let you off mixing with great men, reporting famous affairs, or having lain with the first ladies in the land.
More by Virginia Woolf
“Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless.”
“The world is crammed with delightful things”
“But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.”
More on Writing
“Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.”
“The language of the poem is the language of particulars.”
“I report as a machine; I write as a person. That clear dichotomy softens the transition.”
More on Sincerity
“How much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception, and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerity.”
“I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest. I lie and relie on the earth.”
“If we are nonviolent through and through, our nonviolence would have been self-evident.”