journal

The smell of cigarette smoke in the air in a tavern that changes names often,a bar cursed because of a girl who died of a drug overdose in the basement, we put a few coins in the jukebox;chose __ngel Band_ by Johnny Cash and sat down at the bar,ordered a soda, you wanted a whiskey on the rocks.We saw the coal miner who moved here from West Virginiaknocking back liquor like I drink sweet tea.No one asked why he was so solemn today.It was warm. It was relatively quiet.To anyone else, this place could feel sinister.But to us, it was freedom. It was a hiding place.No one was ever here long enough to know us.And we liked it that way.

Journal writing is a wonderful pathway to self-awareness.

An ad for cigars appears in 100,000 newspapers; sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter. A new play receives a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; the playwright shoots himself. Who__ the better writer?

She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wants to correct, rewrite.

I felt I had a calling in my life to be in full-time ministry, and although I was very successful in the insurance business, earning a very large six-figure income, I gave notice to my company and sold out in January 2007 to go into the ministry full-time.

I have 365-days thankful notes. What a sacred-thanks?

All night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of his own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly--not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things the outer limits would suffice.

How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at age thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.Honda felt that his youth had ended with the death of Kiyoaki Matsugae. At that moment something real within him, something that had burned with a vibrant brilliance, suddenly ceased to be.Now, late at night, when Honda grew weary of his legal drafts, he would pick up the dream journal that Kiyoaki had left him and turn over its pages.(...)Since then eighteen years had passed. The border between dream and memory had grown indistinct in Honda__ mind. Because the words contained in this journal, his only souvenir of his friend, had been traced there by Kiyoaki__ own hand, it had profound significance for Honda. These dreams, left like a handful of gold dust in a winnowing pan, were charged with wonder.As time went by, the dreams and the reality took on equal worth among Honda__ diverse memories. What had actually occurred was in the process of merging with what could have occurred. As reality rapidly gave way to dreams, the past seemed very much like the future.When he was young, there had been only one reality, and the future had seemed to stretch before him, swelling with immense possibilities. But as he grew older, reality seemed to take many forms, and it was the past that seemed refracted into innumerable possibilities. Since each of these was linked with its own reality, the line distinguishing dream and reality became all the more obscure. His memories were in constant flux, and had taken on the aspect of a dream.

I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should not probably forget all about them.

I write to prove that we lived. I write both to remember and to let go. I write because I can't stop, not until this horrible story of ours is over and we're safe at home.

First organizing it on paper isn't just academic, it's an applied prerequisite for manifestation.

...then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer.

The power of writing is phenomenal.

If you do not write the thoughts of the moments, it is lost forever.

There were times, in the beginning, when I used my journal as a wailing wall, but I learned not to immortalize the darkness. Rereading it was counterproductive. What I needed was a place in which to collect the light.

You ought to write grateful gratitude every day

Documenting little details of your everyday life becomes a celebration of who you are.

I resolve to write a new chapter of my life every new day in the New Year.