Ann Beattie Quotes

What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.

A person loves to review his own mind. That is the use of a diary, or journal.

when I first began this diary I said I would give a record of my inner life. I begin to wonder if I have said anything about my inner life. What if I have no inner life?

I have never dissected my personal life. What sense would it make?

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

She should think about her own soul, what she was going to do with this funky tattered pond dank item. Dark and stained, a ruined thing.

My diary seems to keep me whole.

I got out this diary, & read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity.

To have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintance and actions, when the hour arrives in which time is more nimble than memory, is the reason which induces me to keep a journal: a journal in which I must confess my every thought, must open my whole heart!

I spend half my time just living my life, and the other half analyzing it.

Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

A journal of the 'subjective' kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.

I'm an introspective dude.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

I've always been just kind of consumed by my own thoughts.

I just want to live each moment, but it's kind of hard to do that when you are asked to analyze yourself constantly. But it's also good in that you are forced to think about things that you don't ordinarily think about. I think it's strange.

I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.

Whenever you're writing something that's reflective, you have to put yourself through some sort of ordeal just to understand the way you're feeling.

The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart.

There are certain things that make me relax, like writing my journal. That's the only time that I'm relaxing. It's the only time I really get to examine myself.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

I don't want to think too much about me.

I am a spy in the house of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life.

I used to love writing in my journal.