Femininity meant having to hide one's true feelings.
-- Narrator (Notebook #1)

Importance: Despite the narrator's queer identity, this quote encapsulates the author's heightened awareness of acting within the gender binary, in this case how women properly prescribe to femininity through passivity.

Your individual circumstances, which separate you from everyone else, will keep you behind bars for life.
-- Narrator (Notebook #1)

Importance: Here, the narrator expresses isolation, a symptom of the persisting individual versus society conflict exacerbated due to her non-normative identity. The language associated with prison also illustrates a lack of empathy.

Whenever my memory failed me, I would take out a notebook and look at it, and go over the events that made me who I am. They illustrate a process.
-- Narrator (Notebook #1)

Importance: This quote shows the importance of journals and writing to the narrator's growth, as well as the power of writing as a form of expression, especially for the marginalized. Historically, journals have served as unmonitored creative...