Quotes from Anais Nin

Paul, Paul, this is the claim you never made, the fervor you never showed. You were so cool and light, so elusive, and I never felt you encircling me and claiming possession. Rango is saying all the words I wanted to hear you say. You never came close to me, even while taking me. You took me as men take foreign women in distant countries whose language they cannot speak. You took me in silence and strangeness.

When I saw you, Sabina, I chose my body.

Y]ou have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.

When I saw you I thought, here is a man I could love. And I was no longer afraid of feelings. I couldn't go through with the suicide (idea of killing off romanticism), something held me back.

You had to account for every move, arrival or exit. In the world there was a conspiracy against improvisation. It was only permitted in jazz.

For the first time, in Golconda, she had practiced Larry's choice of withdrawing if the people were not of quality. Of preferring solitude to the effort of pretending he was interested in them.

The more hunger, the greater the desires, like those of men in prison, wild and haunting. So we had here a perfect world in which to grow the flower of eroticism. Of course, if you get too hungry, too continuously, you become a bum, a tramp.

In Peru, said Gonzalo, they cure madness by placing the madman next to a flowing river. The water flows, he throws stones into it, his feelings begin to flow again, and he is cured.

Each one of us possesses in himself a separate and distinct city, a unique city, as we possess different aspects of the same person.

Golconda remained a city where the wind was like velvet, where the sun was made of radium, and the sea as warm as a mother's womb.

Perhaps, said the Doctor pensively. It may also be that you Americans are work-cultists, and work is the structure that holds you up, not the joy of pure living.

Tonight I am all in flames.

For I am the kind of dangerous dreamer who executes all his reveries, wishes, words, promises, plans. The wildest and the lightest. A wish for me is not a game: it's a creation.

Behind my romanticism lies a primitive woman with primitive hungers.

Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. But I am more preoccupied with loving.

I want to make the feminine scar. Helen of Troy was, after all, unfecundable. She was one of the rigid ones, like [Virginia] Woolf and [Rebecca] West.

I would like to be naked and cover myself with cold crystal jewelry. Jewelery and perfume...

Lillian did not know then that the one who believes he can pay this early debt meets a bottomless well. Because the first denial has set off a fatality of revenge which no amount of giving can placate.

He observed confusion and chaos, which I call living by one's emotions instead of one's mind.

Drink champagne! It's advertised in the Tribune as a "health" drink. Drink champagne while listening to Bach and Beethoven. It's a fine preventative.

They who walk in the light do not see those in the shadow.

Djuna concerned only with the longitude, and latitude and altitude of human beings in relation to each other.

what she hated above all was that most men in her presence wilted, grew small and feeble. only the timid ones approached her, as if to seek her strength.

Such obsession with reaching the moon, because they had failed to reach each other, each a solitary planet! In silence, in mystery, a human being was formed, was exploded, was struck by other passing bodies, was burned, was deserted. And then it was born in the molten love of the one who cared.