Notebook Quotes

“Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.”
― Will Self

“It's like there are a million screams caught inside of my chest but I have to keep them all in because what's the point of screaming if you'll never be heard and no one will ever hear me in her. No one will ever hear me again.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Destroy Me

“Thought is always out in front. It sees too far, farther than the body which lives in the present.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. 'Theme for a novel: The contrary pull ... " No. If this notion were real, he needn't make a note. A notion on which a note had to be made would be stillborn anyway, his notebook was a parish register of such, born and dead on the same page. Let it live if it can. ("Novelty")”
― John Crowley, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now

“It's always useless to try to cut oneself off, even from other people's cruelty and stupidity. You can't say: "I don't know about it." One either fights or collaborates. There is nothing less excusable than war, and the appeal to national hatreds. But once war has come, it is both cowardly and useless to try to stand on one side under the pretext that one is not responsible. Ivory towers are down. Indulgence is forbidden—for oneself as well as for other people. It is both impossible and immoral to judge an event from outside. One keeps the right to hold this absurd misfortune in contempt only by remaining inside it. One individual's reaction has no intrinsic importance. It can be of some use, but I can justify nothing. Dilettante's dream of being free to hover above his time is the most ridiculous form of liberty. This is why I must try to serve. And, if they don't want me, I must also accept the position of the "despised civilian." In both cases, I am absolutely free to judge things and to feel as disgusted with them as I like. In both cases, I am in the midst of the war and have the right to judge it. To judge it and to act”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“You would not write about loneliness so much if you knew how to get the most out of it”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“Today, I feel free about the past and about what I have lost. All I want is this compactness and enclosed space—this lucid and patient fervor. And like the warm bread that one kneads and presses I simply want to hold my life between my hands, like the men who knew how to enclose their life between these flowers and these columns. The same is true of those long nights spent on trains, where one can talk to oneself, prepare oneself for life, and feel marvelously patient in taking up ideas again, stopping them in their fight, and then once more moving forward. To lick one's life like a stick of barley sugar, to form, sharpen, and finally fall in love with it, in the same way as one searches for the word, the image, the definitive sentence, the word or image which marks a close or a conclusion, from which one can start out again and which will color the way we see the world. I can easily stop now, and finally reach the end of a year of unrestrained and over restrained life. My effort now is to carry this presence of myself to myself through to the very end, to maintain it whatever aspect my life takes on—even at the price of the loneliness which I know is so difficult to bear. Not to give way—that is the whole secret. Not to surrender, not to betray. All the violent part of my character helps me in this, carrying me to the point where I am rejoined by my love, and by the furious passion for life which gives meaning to my days.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“The peculiar vanity of man, who wants to believe and who wants other people to believe that he is seeking after truth, when in fact it is love that he is asking this world to give him.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“He said: "We must have one love, one great love in our life, since it gives us an alibi for all the moments when we are filled with motiveless despair. (November 16)”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“For a man who is "nobly born," happiness lies in taking on the fate of everyman; not through a desire for renunciation but a will to happiness. To be happy, you need time. Lots of time. Happiness too is a long patience. And it is the need for money that robs us of time. Time can be bought. Everything can be bought. To be rich means having time to be happy when you are worthy of happiness.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“A time comes when one can no longer feel the emotion of love. The only thing left is tragedy. Living for someone or for something no longer has any meaning. Nothing seems to keep its meaning except the idea of dying for something.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“In the local movie theater, you can buy mint-flavored lozenges with the words: "Will you marry me one day?" "Do you love me" written on them, together with the replies: "This evening," "A lot," etc. You pass them to the girl next to you, who replies in the same way. Lives become linked together by an exchange of mint lozenges.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“November 16.
He said: "We must have one love, one great love in our life, since it gives us an alibi for all the moments when we are filled with motiveless despair.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“One thinks differently about the same thing in the morning and in the evening. But where is the truth, in the night thought or in the spirit of midday? Two replies, two races of men.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“The only liberty possible is liberty as regards death. The really free man is the one who, accepting death as it is, at the same time accepts its consequences—that is to say, the abolition of all life's traditional values. Ivan Karamazov's "Everything is permitted" is the only expression there is of a coherent liberty. And we must follow out all the consequences of his remark.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“If to love implies spending one's life loving, and creating a particular kind of life, then pure love is a love which is dead. It becomes nothing more than a point of reference, and we still need to seek an understanding about all the rest”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“To abolish hope is to bring the thought back to the body. And the body is doomed to perish.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“Tragedy forms a closed world, in which we stumble over and knock against obstacles. In the theater, tragedy must be born and die in the restricted area of the stage”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“If we think that we can do something big and include passion, it does not mean that you will be able to do it. There are different situations for all human beings in life; the circumstances of their life and your life are not the same. That's why instead of doing something big, think of doing something good and big according to the situation. Do not lose your senses in the absence of books and online videos.”
― Nr. M. J. K. Molai

“The clouds thicken over the cloister and night gradually darkens the ledger stones bearing the moral virtues attributed to the dead. If I had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write: "I recognize only one duty, and that is to love." And, as far as everything else is concerned, I say no. I say no with all my strength.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“I am uncertain of the future, but have achieved total liberty toward my past and toward myself. Here lies my poverty, and my sole wealth. It is as if I were beginning the game all over again, neither happier nor unhappier than before. But aware now of where my strength lies, scornful of my own vanities, and filled with that lucid fervor which impells me forward toward my fate.”
― Albert Camus

“The only liberty possible is a liberty as regards death. The really free man is the one who, accepting death as it is, at the same time accepts its consequences—that is to say, the abolition of all life's traditional values. Ivan Karamazov's "Everything is permitted" is the only expression there is of a coherent liberty. And we must follow out all the consequences of his remark.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves. For most people, it's the embarrassment, the need to make a choice, the choice which makes them go but feel remorse for not having been brave enough to stay home, or which makes them stay at home but regret that they can't share the way others are going to die.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“It is always useless to try to cut oneself off, even from other people's cruelty and stupidity. You can't say: "I don't know about it." One either fights or collaborates. There is nothing less excusable than war, and the appeal to national hatreds. But once war has come, it is both cowardly and useless to try to stand on one side under the pretext that one is not responsible. Ivory towers are down. Indulgence is forbidden—for oneself as well as for another people. It is both impossible and immoral to judge an event from outside. One keeps the right to hold this absurd misfortune in contempt only by remaining inside it. One individual's reaction has no intrinsic importance. It can be of some use, but I can justify nothing. Dilettante's dream of being free to hover above his time is the most ridiculous form of liberty. This is why I must try to serve. And, if they don't want me, I must also accept the position of the "despised civilian." In both cases, I am absolutely free to judge things and to feel as disgusted with them as I like. In both cases, I am in the midst of the war and have the right to judge it. To judge it and to act.”
― Albert Camus

“Tonight, according to her astronomy notebook (#4 of her notebooks, which were even rarer and harder to come by than actual books, according to Gothel), the moon would be new, meaning not there at all; the sky would be black but for the stars. And in a few days the floating lights would appear.
They came at the same time every year. Even when it was cloudy, Rapunzel could see the telltale pinprick glows of their presence, gold and pink against the clouds. Which meant they were of the earth; below the moon and stars. How far up the lights floated she could never tell; they drifted into indifference when her eyes could no longer make them out against their sparkling stellar counterparts. Whether they were a natural phenomenon like rain (that went the wrong way) or some sort of magma or volcanic spew (Book #8: Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder, Complete with Letters and Notes by Pliny the Younger-- including, of course, the Elder's death by volcano), or something else entirely (pixies? Titans?), Rapunzel had no idea. She only knew that they came every year on what she had decided was her birthday.
This year she would go see what they were. Herself.”
― Liz Braswell, What Once Was Mine

“There is in fact coming and going,bending
and breaking. One single bolt or screw
holds the blades of a scissors together, into one tool that can cut paper or leather or steel or meat. If you take that screw or break that bolt, the scissors become two things. Two knives. Eyes can cut, too, back and forth. Eyes can turn outward or inward.”
― Peter Rock, Klickitat

“Unlike everything else in these pages, my sketchbook was never intended for any sort of publication. In fact, it was never really meant to be seen by anyone. It's the closest thing I have to a diary, and it exists mainly for my own amusement, practice and mental health.”
― Adrian Tomine, Scrapbook: Uncollected Work, 1990-2004

“Maybe if she would have written things down in a notebook; details smaller than her life. Maybe if she would have turned them into a song. Maybe if she had a picture. These are the ways to remember things that your mind doesn't on its own commit. However it chooses what it does to commit. However.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“And then she left, my peace of mind tucked into her pocket along with her nice little notebook.”
― Sheila Webster Boneham, Drop Dead on Recall

“I have instructed myself, over and over, to keep my notebook handy at all times, but if you told me to describe myself in one word, it would be 'not very good at following directions'.”
― Lemony Snicket, Poison for Breakfast