Franz Kafka

“One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the
changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed,
surmised, and admitted by you, but which you’ll unconsciously deny when it comes to the
point of gaining hope or peace from such an admission. In the diary you find proof that in
situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down
observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because
we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit
the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.”

From Diaries, 1910-1923 .

C.S. Lewis

[On his journal after the death of his wife] “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 think 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.”

From A Grief Observed , by C.S. Lewis

My name is Ernest Miller Hemingway I was born on July 21 1899. My favourite authors are
Kipling, O. Henry and Steuart Edward White. My favourite flower is Lady Slipper and Tiger
Lily. My favourite sports are Trout fishing, Hiking, shooting, football and boxing. My
favourite studies are English, Zoology and Chemistry. I intend to travel and write.

This is the first-ever diary entry of a nine-year-old Ernest Hemingway. Even as a child, we
can see the traits of the direct and simplistic writing style that Hemingway became know for.
Many nine-year-old boys have ideas about what they want to be when they grow up, but
rarely do such visions come true. In the case of Hemingway, however, he did indeed write and
travel extensively. He also became a great huntsman and fisherman, often pictured throughout
his life with the animals he had slain and captured.

The innocence of the diary entry is a far cry from the events that unfolded 52 years later. After
a long history of alcoholism and mental illness, Hemingway killed himself at the age of 61.