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I want to give others sweet thoughts to exalt in being one of the living.
Patty Martino Alspaugh

HOME IS WHERE THE BLOG IS NOT

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Before The Blog: Diarists Speak 365 Days A Year

Promoting Diarists and Diarykeeping

Need a mental jolt? Then you are in the right place!

April 27
2005

Pasta Talks

When Johnny took his first bite of the alphabet pasta I served tonight, he said, “I just ate a whole sentence and I don’t even know what it said.”

Diary of a Born Again Hedonist: 365 Days of Selected Excerpts (Vol 1)

Diaries: Everyone is intrigued with the idea of keeping a diary, but comparatively few go beyond filling in a few pages before tiring of the discipline. Fortunately, there are those who do prevail even though they are ready to apply the brakes. Edmond Goncourt, for instance, distraught after the death of Jules, his brother and fellow scribe of The Goncourt Journals, explains why:

“Now and then, I feel tired of going on with this diary, but I tell myself that I must have the energy . . . for this history of nineteenth-century life, as I am writing it, will really be of considerable interest for later centuries.”

Wouldn’t you love to have someone else read through published diaries for you, select the gems, and provide them to you on a daily basis? Passages that were written on the same day, but 5, 50 or even 500 years ago. That’s what I created this site for . . . to be able to do just that! I’ve been collecting the best passages from hundreds of printed diaries—by both the famous and the not-so-famous—before the blog even existed. Passages that are universal in appeal. Tell a good story. Teach a valuable lesson. Are history in the making. Offer philosophy that opens minds as well as doors. That make you laugh. That elevate!

I’ve read through hundreds of diaries with a keen discerning eye of what provides universal interest. To quote diary scholar Arthur Ponsonby, “Perception, which is the faculty of detaching the significant from the things observed, is a rare talent. The diarist who possesses it will never fail to keep alert a reader of his record.”

How am I qualified? Not only have I been writing in a daily diary for more than 50 years, I wrote my Master’s Thesis on print journalists and their diaries.

My purpose is to not only introduce you to published diaries, as well as selections from my own, but to inspire you to keep a diary and to even post the best of them here for others to see and comment on! You, too, can be selective about what is aired from your diary. And learn from other diarists what readers find intriguing. Create your own following here.