Testimonials

Down through the centuries, people have praised the personal benefits of journaling

henri nouwen found help during his dark times

Henri Nouwen, a Catholic priest who taught at several prestigious universities and gave spiritual direction to thousands, went through a particularly difficult period. 

Even during his darkness, he found that writing in his journal sustained him.

"To my surprise, I never lost the ability to write. In fact, writing became part of my struggle for survival. It gave me the little distance from myself that I needed to keep from drowning in my despair." (Inner Voice of Love, p. xiv-xvi)

 Anne Frank, On writing when fed up

"Mummy is frightfully irritable and that always seems to herald unpleasantness for me. Is it just chance that Daddy and Mummy never rebuke Margot and that they always drop on me for everything?...I cling to Daddy because it is only through him that I am able to retain the remnant of family feeling. Daddy doesn't understand that I need to give vent to my feelings over Mummy sometimes. He doesn't want to talk about it; he simply avoids anything which might lead to remarks about Mummy's failings. Just the same, Mummy and her failings are something I find harder to bear than anything else. I don't know how to keep it all to myself. I can't always be drawing attention to her untidiness, her sarcasm, and her lack of sweetness, neither can I believe that I'm always in the wrong...I have my own views, plans, and ideas, although I can't put them into words yet. Oh, so many things bubble up inside me as I lie in bed, having to put up with people I'm fed up with, who always misinterpret my intentions. That's why in the end I always come back to my diary. That is where I start and finish, because Kitty is always patient. I'll promise her that I shall persevere, in spite of everything, and find my own way through it all, and swallow my tears. I only wish I could see the result already or occasionally receive encouragement from someone who loves me... Yours, Anne.

C.S. Lewis, on writing after his wife died

"What would H. think of this terrible little notebook to which I come back and back? Are these jottings morbid? Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. Do these notes merely aggravate that side of it? Merely confirm the monotonous, treadmill march of the mind round one subject. But what am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn't a strong enough drug now." (excerpt from A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, quoted in C.S. Lewis on Grief, p. 17.)

phil yancey

Why do we write? Why do we do it, we writers? 'Of making many books there is no end,' sighed the Teacher of Ecclesiastes...I think we do it because each of us has nothing else to offer than a living point of view that differentiates us from every other person on this planet. We must tell our stories to someone." (Soul Survivor, 261.)

Alfred Kazin

"…I had been keeping all my life since boyhood, a voluminous daily journal, or sketchbook, into which went everything that I felt like describing and thinking about. What I liked most about this intimate record was writing in it, first thing every morning, in complete spontaneity and naturalness, lifelike and at the quick, as the French say. It represented some effort to think my life out…it was a cherished connection with something fundamental to American literature—the writing of personal history: diaries, journals, letters, memoirs. The influence of Puritanism had created a habit of mind that had persisted into the “American Renaissance” and the peculiarly personal reverberations in Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and how many others—the need to present to God, the Eternal Reader and Judge of the soul’s pilgrimage on earth, the veritable record of one’s inner life." The Past Breaks Out, p 82-83