A Quote by William Plomer

To keep a diary is to attempt a difficult literary form. Its effectiveness is likely to derive from a special blend of honesty and appetite for life that gives the power to record everyday happenings while magically freeing them from banality and triviality.

William Plomer

Quote Topics

Appetite Appetite For Life Attempt Banality Blend Derive Diary Difficult Effectiveness Everyday Form Freeing Gives Happenings Honesty Keep Life Likely Literary Power Record Special Them Triviality While

Quote Author

William Plomer
South African - Novelist
December 10, 1903 - September 21, 1973

I sketch while I'm on set, and it's a way for me to record all of the locations I've been to. I don't keep a diary but a sketchbook.

Jessalyn Gilsig

Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.... Every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and the bias which that revelation gives to life.

George Santayana

I don’t keep a travel diary. I did keep a travel diary once and it was a big mistake. All I remember of that trip is what I bothered to write down. Everything else slipped away, as though my mind felt jilted by my reliance on pen and paper. For exactly the same reason I don’t travel with a camera. My holiday becomes the snapshots and anything I forget to record is lost.

Alex Garland

Any effort... to make the obscure obvious is likely to be unappealing, for the penalty of failure is confusion while the reward of success is banality.

Nelson Goodman

In every remodelling of the present, the existing condition of things must be supplanted by a new one. Now every variety of circumstances in which men find themselves, every object which surrounds them, communicates a definite form and impress to their internal nature. This form is not such that it can change and adapt itself to any other a man may choose to receive; and the end is foiled, while the power is destroyed, when we attempt to impose upon that which is already stamped in the soul a form which disagrees with it.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Even in my own life, there are memories I have that are difficult to explain - happenings that are so odd and unaccountably weird, that it is difficult to imagine they were not the result of prolonged and frequent contact with aliens throughout my life.

John Hodgman

Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it. May I? Oh, no. You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.

Oscar Wilde

Writing a diary every evening before going to bed is a good habit. We can record in the diary how much time we have devoted to our spiritual practice. The diary should be written in a way that helps us see our mistakes and correct them. It should not be a mere document of other peoples' faults or our daily transactions.

Mata Amritanandamayi

Basically, to lead without a title is to derive your power within the organisation not from your position but from your competence, effectiveness, relationships, excellence, innovation and ethics.

Robin S. Sharma

I maintained a diary when I was a child and had all the happenings jotted down.

Aishwarya R. Dhanush

Without doubt, keep a diary. From the day you're born, keep a diary, because we all forget things so quickly.

Jilly Cooper

I keep a diary because I love this writer, David Sedaris, and he writes a lot about his diary, and he inspired me to keep one.

Maya Hawke

Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.

Theodor Adorno

Every form of power comes down to language. In law, there's all kinds of words you don't know if you're not a lawyer and that gives them power. In business, it's the same thing.