Alexandra Johnson > Quotes

“Successful journals break the deadlock of introspective obsession”
― Alexandra Johnson, Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal

“It took years of keeping journals to trust a simple fact: like life in transit, the writing inside is often fragmented, messy.”
― Alexandra Johnson, Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal

“Journal writing is, foremost, a way to order and reframe perspective.”
― Alexandra Johnson, Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal

“To keep a journal is to learn how to play. Deeply. Even when a page is recording hard, impossible things, if judgment is suspended, there’s always a surprise or shift. Connections made over time suddenly link, opening and transforming.”
― Alexandra Johnson, Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal

“The secret of keeping a journal is seeing it as a draft, a stepping-stone, a process.”
― Alexandra Johnson, Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal

“Thomas Mann that “a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Alexandra Johnson, Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal

“Sitting for even five minutes with a journal offers a rare cease-fire in the battle of daily life.”
― Alexandra Johnson

“The internal Censor (and maddening companions); the necessity for privacy; the security of secrecy. To control these three fears is to unlock the secret of how to slip under the surface of the conscious mind where connections and freedom flourish.”
― Alexandra Johnson, Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal

“Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography … especially for memories of earliest childhood, is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent.
- Katherine Mansfield”
― Alexandra Johnson, The Hidden Writer: Diaries and the Creative Life

“I would not be concerned with the secrets, the lies, the mysteries, the facts...I would be concerned with what makes them necessary.
- Anaïs Nin”
― Alexandra Johnson, The Hidden Writer: Diaries and the Creative Life

“Ten million blank journals are sold annually in stationery stores alone.”
― Alexandra Johnson, Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal

“It’s estimated that sixty-five thousand thoughts float through our mind a day.”
― Alexandra Johnson, Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal

“A diary or journal isn’t necessarily something that should be done daily so much as it is a clue to how to see the daily world around oneself differently.”
― Alexandra Johnson, Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal

“I mark Henry James’ sentence: observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency.
- Virginia Woolf”
― Alexandra Johnson, The Hidden Writer: Diaries and the Creative Life