The Diary of a Young Girl Quotes - Page 3 | Just Great DataBase

We long for Saturdays because that means books. We’re like a lot of little children with a present. Ordinary people don’t know how much books can mean to someone who’s cooped up. Our only diversions are reading, studying and listening to the wireless.

The Knock at the Door by Ina Boudier-Bakker.

I strip the bed as fast as I can so I won’t be tempted to get back in. Do you know what Mother calls this sort of thing? The art of living. Isn’t that a funny expression?

I soothe my conscience with the thought that it’s better for unkind words to be down on paper than for Mother to have to carry them around in her heart.

I’ve always had to pay double for my sins: once with scoldings and then again with my own sense of despair.

Must I keep thinking about those other people, whatever I am doing? And if I want to laugh about something, should I stop myself quickly and feel ashamed that I am cheerful? Ought I then to cry the whole day long? No, that I can’t do. Besides, in time this gloom will wear off.

Besides, your imagination often plays tricks on you in moments of danger.

What goes click ninety-nine times and clack once? A centipede with a clubfoot.

Whenever someone comes in from outside, with the wind in their clothes and the cold on their cheeks, I feel like burying my head under the blankets to keep from thinking, When will we be allowed to breathe fresh air again?

If the truth is told, things are just as bad as you yourself care to make them.

And yet they are coming from me. I want to take a fresh look at things and form my own opinion, not just ape my parents, as in the proverb ‘The apple never falls far from the tree.

When looked outside, right into the depth of Nature and God, then I was happy, really happy.

She’s not a mother to me – I have to mother myself. I’ve cut myself adrift from them. I’m charting my own course, and we’ll see where it leads me.

Father emptied a card file for Margot and me and filled it with index cards that are blank on one side. This is to become our reading file, in which Margot and I are supposed to note down the books we’ve read, the author and the date.

You only really get to know people when you’ve had a jolly good row with them. Then and then only can you judge their true characters!

We all had lots of stories of our sad experiences - they mourned the death of my wife with me - but we were hopeful that the children would return.

For me, it was a revelation. There, was revealed a completely different Anne to the child that I had lost. I had no idea of the depths of her thoughts and feelings.

I just can't think how I would go on without children having lost Edith already... It's too upsetting for me to write about them. Naturally, I still hope, and wait, wait, wait.

How could I have known how much it meant for her to see a patch of blue sky, to observe the flying seagulls, or how important that chestnut tree was to her, when she had never shown an interest in nature before. But once she felt like a caged bird, how she longed for it. Even just the thought of the open air gave her comfort, but she kept all these feelings to herself.

I shall remember the look in Margot's eyes all my life.

Most parents don’t know really their children.

I think it is not only important that people go to the Anne Frank House to see the secret annex, but also that they are helped to realise that people are also persecuted today because of their race, religion or political convictions.

I will never forget the moment when Peter van Pels and I saw a group of selected men. Among those men was Peter's father. The men were marched away. Two hours later, a lorry came by, loaded with their clothing.

One day in Auschwitz I became so dispirited that I couldn't carry on. They had given me a beating, which wasn't exactly a pleasant experience. It was on a Sunday, and I said: 'I can't get up'. Then my comrades said: 'That's impossible, you have to get up, otherwise you're lost'. They went to a Dutch doctor, who worked with the German doctor. He came to me in the barracks and said: 'Get up and come to the hospital barracks early tomorrow morning. I'll talk to the German doctor and make sure you are admitted'. Because of that I survived.

There are no walls, no bolts, no locks that anyone can put on your mind.