A Life Discarded Quotes

“Her ordinariness, and the fact that she has written so much about it, is what makes her interesting.”
― Alexander Masters, A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip

“Diaries are terrible liars. They record dramas out of context, encourage paranoia, rearrange facts, are deliberately biased and self-justifying, blind you with irrelevance, censor alternative opinion, exaggerate petty complaints into tragic emblems and, in particular, wallow in the fact that any fool can write about dejection, but describing happiness takes determination and skill. Most diaries are moans in writing, even when the person writing them is happy.”
― Alexander Masters, A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip

“...when writing a biography, you can't trust certainties. Just as you're about to pounce on something that will condemn you to a tidy answer, pooooofff! It vanishes.”
― Alexander Masters, A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip

“A person can write five million words about itself, and forget to tell you its name. Or its sex. People don't include obvious identifiers in diaries: things such as what they're called or where their home is. They are simply 'I' who lives.”
― Alexander Masters, A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip

“Skeptics become overwhelmed by the different and conflicting accounts of what happiness, justice, truth are all about.”
― Alexander Masters, A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip

“Here lies … /Who did nothing/Went nowhere/Was loved by nobody.”
― Alexander Masters, A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip

“The feeling that everyone feels, of a life not lived.”
― Alexander Masters, A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip

“Diaries teach us that it is too much to be inside anybody’s head. It is a horrible place. All that repetition; that endless analysis that doesn’t analyze, just mulls a point over and over until it drops dead from banality.”
― Alexander Masters, A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip

“Her life was a failure because she never focused on anything in particular. She didn’t know how to concentrate her attention.”
― Alexander Masters, A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip

“The physicist’s picture of the world encompasses the entire sweep from future to past. The junction between the two, that minuscule ring of the present that matters so much to us, has no distinctive theoretical role.”
― Alexander Masters, A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip

“Most diaries are moans in writing, even when the person writing them is happy.”
― Alexander Masters, A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip

“Any fool can write about dejection, but describing happiness takes determination and skill.”
― Alexander Masters, A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip