Everything But Nothing: A Diary

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She remained, throughout the guided tour she gave me of her mind, honest, funny, outlandish and respectable. It was difficult to tell which was murdering Dido quicker: I was now working on the diaries every spare minute of my time. He was her private piano teacher: He is also spiteful, petty-minded and a prig. In the midst of his relentless attacks, he also gave away her name. I missed my nameless pronoun. An abstract that had a few minutes before floated everywhere had been crushed into a particular. I liked this woman, whatever her name. I enjoyed her clumsiness and her obsessions and her occasional desires for an outburst of violence.

I thought I recognised a lot of her qualities in myself. I wanted to understand her. Biographers often report that they enjoy a private relationship with their subject that is even when this is impossible, because the subject is dead shared on both sides. So what if Laura was called Laura? At one point in the early s, in her 20s, she was living in poverty in London.

Like every young, healthy, intelligent, imaginative, gifted person, she was full of wild and impossible plans. The handwriting in these volumes is urgent. Some entries are thousands of words long.

She is trying to capture every second of her day. Occasionally, pressed on by her excitement, her handwriting wobbles and she resorts to underscoring: Elsa is 50 years older than Laura. I had to leap up from my bed and dab the walls to sop up my splattered tea after I read it. When they first met and Laura fell in love, Laura was 14 and Elsa She lost her closest friend, her mentor, her decision-maker, her personification of artistry and, for the next 20 years, herself.

She gives up her hobbies: The early diaries from the s are written in ebullient letters. Five words are sometimes all it takes to fill the width of a page. The height of her letters becomes the same as the thickness of her pen nib.

It is impossible to read more than a volume at a time of this miniscule script. After , everything succumbs to television. She disappears as a human being in these last years of her life, and reappears as cataloguer of Michael Barrymore gossip. Laura frequently refers to a man called Peter.

She can leave her room and the house; but she is back on her mattress by the end of the day.

Diary Quotes

Is she suffering from a mild version of Stockholm syndrome? Laura is not his prisoner. She is not the Trinity don gone wrong. She is his live-in housekeeper.

And so the surprises leaped up from the pages of these gentle, quiet diaries. Everything in, about and around the text was a clue. Below the fat are the muscles of your face When you pull up your upper lipwhen you show that one top tooth, the one the museum guard brokethis is your levator labii superioris muscle at work.

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Let's pretend you smell some old stale urine. Imagine your husband's just killed himself in your family car. Imagine you have to go out and sponge his piss out of the driver's seat. When a normal person, some normal innocent person who sure as hell deserved a lot better, when she comes home from waiting tables all day and finds her husband suffocated in the family car, his bladder leaking, and she screams, this is simply her orbicularis stretched to the very limit. You expected more from her than she did from herself.

Diary Quotes by Chuck Palahniuk

Really look at your face. Look at your eyes, your mouth. This is what you think you know best. All you need to know is this is your face. It's when a painting, or any form of art, is so beautiful it overwhelms the viewer. It's a form of shock. When Stendhal toured the Church of Santa Croce in Florence in , he reported almost fainting from joy. People feel rapid heart palpitations.

Looking at great art makes you forget your own name, forget even where you're at.

It can bring on depression and physical exhaustion. An artists job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything.

You shuffle and reorganize. Retrieved from " https: You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping. How your head is the cave, your eyes the cave mouth. How you live inside your head and only see what you want. How you only watch the shadows and make up your own meaning. Nothing you could auction.

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The scars left from happiness. Our soul has lived so many lives that we know everything. Teachers and education can only remind us of what we already know.

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