The Quiet Power of Omission

Why our private pages tell only part of the story.

Lit Window is a series written from the floor of Godmothers. It traces the light that literature casts through the books, gatherings, and conversations that leave their mark.

One of our booksellers, Anya, shared an annotated excerpt of The Woman Destroyed with me; she and I have similar taste in reading and this reveal is one of my favorite forms of connection. The pages were alive with margin notes and underlines, but one line—highlighted in green—held a charge:

(What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.)

It’s a quiet observation. Almost throwaway in its parenthetical phrasing (a style I’m partial to myself). But it lingers.

We tend to think of diaries as the rawest form of expression—unguarded and honest by default. But the truth is, even in private, we often perform. We avoid. We tell the story we can live with. Or the one we think our future selves might find noble, or brave, or at least coherent.

There’s something almost spectral about that: the fact that even when we’re alone on the page (unless we’re practicing non-attachment, burning morning pages) we still hold something back. But perhaps it’s not restraint…perhaps language doesn’t always know how to carry what we mean.

Anya’s note in the margin reads:

The most important details in my diary are the ones I am too afraid to put into words. I resist them and resist the memories (perhaps afraid of the permanence it brings.)

It’s the kind of annotation that makes you pause mid-sentence—not because it’s loud, but because it’s plainly true. We don’t always write what hurts. We don’t always write what matters. And when we do, it’s often abstracted—filtered through a lens that wants to get it “right”. Anya adds:

Writing is permanence and in that there is power, the mind can warp and forget, but if you write it down you are forced to remember.

Simone de Beauvoir’s narrator, Monique, is a study in omission. Her voice is expressive, sharp, verbose—and yet, she circles her own interior like a dog waiting for his mother at the door: full of need, but rarely naming it outright.

It is my anger that is keeping us apart…silence—it is dangerous…

It’s the same paradox: what goes unsaid is often the thing that defines the story. And what she doesn’t write—or only half-admits—speaks just as loudly as what she does.

This is what makes annotation so powerful. It can be a form of rupture—an interruption of the text, a refusal to let it lie still. Marginalia becomes a kind of second voice. A palimpsest. Not quite confession, not quite argument, but something intimate nonetheless.

This page reminded us that writing—even private writing—is never neutral. And sometimes, the version of ourselves we don’t write down is the most revealing of all.

What have you been leaving out?