Quotes from Anais Nin

No privacy left. No manners.

Didn't the old man know how words carry colors and sounds into the flesh

When human pain has struck me fiercely, when anger has corroded me, I rise, I always rise after the crucifixion, and I am in terror of my ascensions. THE FISSURE IN REALITY. The divine departure. I fall. I fall into darkness after the collusion with pain, and after pain the divine departure.

Write immediately, yes! But as artist! Write with the task in mind—always trying to say the thing in the best way you can. The how! Not the what!

I always have difficulty with people who are not openly warm, expressive. I need a certain sign, a certain invitation.

I was growing sad, sad with restlessness and hunger. I felt that nothing would happen to me. I felt desperate with desire to be a woman, to plunge into living. Why was I enslaved by this need of being in love first? Where would my life begin? It seemed to me that a great current was passing all around me and that I was left out. I would have to find someone who felt as I did. But where? Where?

Nothing seems true today except the death of the goldfish who used to make love at ninety kilometers an hour in the pool. The maid has given him a Christian burial. To the worms! To the worms!

Fucking is an art. The mere fact of introducing the cock in the cunt and moving it in and out until the ejaculation of spunk is not art. True, it is fucking, but the difference between that way of doing it and the way it should be done, is like the difference between a child's first drawing and a picture by the world's greatest painter.

We can build a palace around us if everything is right between us.

What can you give when there is no self, when you have no sensitivity, no receptivity, no warmth, nothing to contact others with?

Hugo and I yield entirely to each other. We cannot be without each other, we cannot endure discord, war, estrangement, we cannot take walks alone, we do not like to travel without each other. We have yielded in spite of our individualism, our hatred of intimacy. We have absorbed our egocentric selves into our love. Our love is our ego.

We are dancing on our irony as upon the top of glowing sparks.

Everything could undergo conversion except the artists. How can you convert disorganizers of past and present order, the chronic dissenters, those dispossessed of the present anyway, the atom bomb throwers of the mind, of the emotions, seeking to generate new forces and a new order of mind out of continuous upheavals?

I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.

I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one. I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.

She is bizarre, fantastic, nervous, like someone in a high fever. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat before her, I felt I would do anything she asked of me. Henry suddenly faded. She was color and brilliance and strangeness. By the end of the evening I had extricated myself from her power. She killed my admiration by her talk. Her talk. The enormous ego, false, weak, posturing. She

A long time ago, said Michael, I decided never to fall in love again. I have made of desire an anonymous activity. But not to feel...not to love...is like dying within life, Michael.

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 of multitude of selves, of fragments.

How to live as divided cells — voilà! Something always eludes the scientists, the poets, the stargazers, the biologists, the anthropologists. Something eludes the informers, detectives, police, lawyers. It is the dream. And what lies in the deformed mirrors of the dream and haunts our sleep is the secret of everything.

Watch the conqueror well, watch the man or woman who dominates another: he is not the one who loves. The one who loves is the one who is dominated.

She was truthful, or I was the greatest dupe who ever existed. I can only believe in our ecstasy. I don't want to know, I only want to love her.

I walked into a white city. It was a honeycomb of ivory-white cells, streets like ribbons of old ermine. The stone and mortar were mixed with sunlight, with musk and white cotton. I passed by streets of peace lying entangled like cotton spools...

You can't save people, you can only love them.

Men from the mountains always dream of the sea, and above all things I love to travel.