Quotes from Anais Nin

That night Fay became a woman, making a secret of her pain, intent on saving her happiness with Albert, on showing wisdom and subtlety.

As soon as I kiss him I know that I love him with a blind instinct beyond all reason, with all his defects.

I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essentially human, not intellectual. I do not understand abstract act. Only art born of love, passion, pain.

I said to a Frenchman the other day: "I love genius," He answered: "A woman gives genius to the man she loves.

His body smelled like a precious-wood forest; his hair, like sandalwood, his skin, like cedar. It was as if he had always lived among trees and plants.

The river of life divides into two branches: being and formulating.

We don't see things how they are, we see things the way we are.

Your beauty drowns me, drowns the core of me. When your beauty burns me I dissolve as I never dissolved before man. From all men I was different, and myself, but I see in you that part of me which is you. I feel you in me, I feel my own voice becoming heavier, as if I were drinking you in every delicate tread of resemblance being soldered by fire and one no longer detects the fissure.

I awoke at dawn, thrown up on a rock, the skeleton of a ship choked in its own sails.

That last afternoon in Henry's hotel room was for me like a white-hot furnace. Before, I had only white heat of the mind and of the imagination; now it is of the blood. Sacred completeness. I come out dazed in the mellow spring evening and I think, now I would not mind dying.

I guess I am disturbed only because so little strains through the meshes and I am thinking in such violent floods.

I have forgotten my mask and my face was in it. Man

The homosexuals wrote as if they were women. The timid ones wrote about orgies. The frigid ones about frenzied fulfill-ments. The most poetic ones indulged in pure bestiality and the purest ones in perversions. We were haunted by the marvelous tales we could not tell. We sat around, imagined this old man, talked of how much we hated him, because he would not allow us to make a fusion of sexuality and feeling, sensuality and emotion.

I felt him in everything. And what I felt was too deep.

I do not need to be a selfless child, or a woman giving to the point of self-annihilation.

It is part of her beauty, this quality of being not quite there, dreamlike.

My attraction to drugs is based on an immense desire to annihilate awareness.

I am happy today. I am a tyrant.

A man who dominates is a man who does not love. He has a tremendous animal vitality, a force, which conquers. He conquers, people are subjected by him, but he neither loves nor understands

Now, his hair is white and he no longer understands anyone's need to love, for he has lost everything, not to love, but to his games of love; and when you love as a game, you lose everything, as he lost his home and wife, and now he clings to me, afraid of loss, afraid of solitude.

I can afford to be wrong, because I am more right—that's all.

Anaïs Nin noted in her diary: "The same thing which makes Henry indestructible is what makes me indestructible: It is that at the core of us is a writer, not a human being.

I am sure you would not understand if I told you my father is delightfully clear and selfish, tender and lying, formal and incurable. He exhausts all the loves given to him. If I did not leave his house at night to warm myself in Rango's burning hands I would die at my task, arid and barren, sapless, while my father monologues about his past, and I yawn yawn yawn...

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.   —D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, pg. 20