la femme au carnet rouge.

"Can you experience nostalgia for something that hasn't happened? We talk of 'regrets' about the course of our lives, when we are almost certain we have taken the wrong decision; but one can also be enveloped in a sweet and mysterious euphoria, a sort of nostalgia for what might have been."

"I haven't kept a diary since I was seventeen. I think it was soon after my baccalauréat that I gave it up for reasons I'm not sure of, because from the age of twelve or thirteen I had written one religiously. (Note to self: Look for my diaries in the boxes in the cellar.) I remember sticking all kinds of things in them: tickets from films and plays I had been to see, leaves I had picked up on walks and bills for meals I had eaten on café terraces. They were a record of what I had done when, down to the nearest minute. I think I held on to them as 'evidence' of some kind. They helped me to find my place in the world and, in a broader sense, to prove to myself that I really existed. I suppose I must have decided at some point that I no longer needed to do that, because I gave up writing a diary, stopped telling the story of my life and tried to just live it instead."

- from "The Red Notebook" by Antoine Laurain. a beautiful little treasure of a book.