Diary

"What sort of diary should I like mine to be?

Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly,

so elastic that it will embrace anything,

solemn,

slight or beautiful,

that comes into my mind.

I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all,

in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.

I should like to come back,

after a year or two,

and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced,

as such deposits so mysteriously do,

into a mould,

transparent enough to reflect the light of our life,

and yet steady,

tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.

The main requisite,

I think,

on reading my old volumes,

is not to play the part of a censor,

but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever;

since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard,

and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time." -Virginia Woolf