Quotes from Anais Nin

Men can be in love with literary figures, with poetic and mythological figures, but let them meet with Artemis, with Venus, with any of the goddesses of love, and then they start hurling moral judgments.

I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept about people around me was that all of them were coordinated into a WHOLE, whereas I was made up of a multitude of selves, of fragments.

Our love would be death. The embrace of imaginings.

Through books I discovered everything to be loved, explored, visited, communed with. I was enriched and given all the blueprints to a marvelous life, I was consoled in adversity, I was prepared for both joys and sorrows, I acquired one of the most precious sources of strength of all: an understanding of human beings, insight into their motivations.

When you're in my arms, I know you're mine. But your feet are so swift, so swift, they carry you as lightly as wings, I never know where, too fast, too fast away from me.

I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all. . .

I am like a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough.

Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.

We must avoid possession, he said. But, oh, let me kiss you.

Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.

You know I've always wanted to break the molds which life forms around one if one lets them. -Why? -I want to trespass boundaries, erase all identifications, anything which fixes one permanently into one mold, one place, without hope of change.

You make me think of Casanova, except that in between the erotic, Casanova was boring, while you, in between eroticism and even because of it, you get profound.

Love the great narcotic was the revealer in the alchemist's bottle rendering visible the most untraceable substances. Love the great narcotic was the agent provocateur exposing all the secret selves to daylight.

And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity...

Does she know I feel immobile and fixed, lost in her?

The inner hatreds of men are now projected outside. There are fights in the streets. Revolutions in France, they say. Men did not seek to resolve their own personal revolutions, so now they act them out collectively.

By beginning a diary, I was already conceding that life would be more bearable if I looked at it as an adventure and a tale. I was telling myself the story of a life, and this transmutes into an adventure the things which can shatter you.

I know that I go through life like a drunkard. I'm drunk on illusion. But no matter how drunk I am, there are things I can't help seeing, ferociously real things. I close my eyes, and I reel, I reel. I reel, I believe, I live in a fever and turmoil, I rise into ecstasy, but all the time there is the face of reality staring at me with ugly eyes. I know that if I open my eyes I will be intolerably hurt by the ugliness.

I am caught. And he? What does he feel? I am invaded, I lose everything, my mind vacillates, I am only aware of sensation.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with, we cease to see.

In this instant of danger they realized they were each other's reason for living, and into this instant they threw their whole being.

I said, If there is an explanation of the mystery, it is this: the love between women is a refuge and an escape into harmony and narcissism in place of conflict.

The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery. Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream.

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.