journal Quotes

“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.”

“Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.”

“Behind me lay the increasingly solemn silhouette of what was no longer really a lighthouse but instead a kind of reliquary.”

“An absence is not a presence, but still with each new depiction of a thistle, a shiver worked deeper and deeper into my spine.”

“After a while, a kind of unease came over me as I began to perceive a terrible presence hovering in the background of these entries. I saw the Crawler or some surrogate approaching in that space just beyond the thistle, and the single focus of the journal keeper a way of coping with that horror.”

“I had the sense that they now saw the world through a kind of veil, that they spoke to their interviewers from across a vast distance in time and space.”

“My fingers trembled as I opened the cover. There would be so much of Amy in this book it would be impossible to get through it without a few major cries. But I had to read it.”

“Today Mathilda’s family went to the movies, the next day they went to the beach, then they had a picnic”. I kept wondering what the point of the story was - obviously had to do with the father but even that didn’t intrigue me in the slightest.”

“We are instructed to write down not just our deeds but our feelings, because it must be known that we do have feelings. Remorse. Regret. Sorrow too great to bear. Because if we didn’t feel those things, what monsters would we be?”

“A public journal, testifying to those who will never die and those who are yet to be born, as to why we human beings do the things we do.”

″‘Barrabas came to us by sea’, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own.”