Quotes from Anais Nin

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.

Secrets. Need to disguise. The novel was born of this.

He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away.

I can't let you go now. I want to go places with you; obscure little places, just to be able to say: here I came with her.

If happiness is the absence of fever then I will never know happiness. For I am posessed by a fever for knowledge, experience and creation.

I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them.

You are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.

I have no fear of God, and yet fear keeps me awake at night,fear of the devil. And if I believe in the devil, I must believe in God. And if evil is abhorrent to me, I must be a saint. Henry, save me from beatification, from the horrors of static perfection. Precipitate me into the inferno.

She was fully, painfully aware that very rarely did midnight strike in two hearts at once, very rarely did midnight arouse two different equal desires, and that any dislocation in this, any indifference, was an indication of disunity, of the difficulties, the impossibilities of fusion between two human beings.

We sit on the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds.

Wherever there is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me.

I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.

If I fall asleep, it is because I am overloaded. I sleep because one hour with Henry contains five years of my life, and one phrase, one caress answers the expectations of a hundred nights. When I hear him laugh, I say, I have heard Rabelais.. And I swallow his laughter like bread and wine.

At sixteen, Sabina took moon baths—first of all, because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous.

Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go.

You haven't loved yet, he said. You've only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, illusion is not love, desire alone is not love. All these were paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way.

I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife.

Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.

The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams.

There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.

I told her, We have both lost ourselves, but sometimes we reveal the most when we are least like ourselves. I am not trying to think any more. I can't think when I am with you. You are like me, wishing for a perfect moment, but nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a worldly way. Neither one of us can say just the right thing. We are overwhelmed. Let us be overwhelmed. It is so lovely, so lovely. I love you June.

Even when they did not look at each other or speak to each other, he could feel a powerful current between them.