Quotes from Anais Nin

Speak for yourself, always. It is lack of confidence. You can say things as well as Dostoevsky, Elie Faure or anybody you quote. Dare to speak for yourself. Let the other people lie in your blood, but faceless, nameless, diluted, masticated by you, reproduced etc.

I gave him the one thing June cannot give him: honesty. I am so ready to admit what a supremely developed ego would not admit: that June is a terrifying and inspiring character who makes every other woman insipid, that I would live her life except for my compassion and my conscience, that she may destroy Henry the man, but Henry the writer is more enriched by ordeals than by peace.

To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break myself. I want to live only for ecstasy. Nothing else affects me. Small doses, moderate loves, all the demi-teintes – all these leave me cold. I like extravagance, heat… sexuality which bursts the thermometer! I'm neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous - lava, inflammable, unrestrained. I feel like a jungle animal who is escaping captivity.

Awareness hurts. Relationships hurts. Life hurts. But to float, to drift, to live in the dream does not hurt.

What does it mean that you have not written me?... Am I a dream to you, am I not real and warm for you? What new loves, new ecstasies, new impulses move you now?

You sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in spite of it, out of anything, any material given to him. The torments and hells of [crazy men], are not for you.

Eu sunt femeia care ofer? iluzie, care primeÅŸte imaginaÅ£ia b?rbatului. O situaÅ£ie pe care târfa o invidiaz?... Târfa domneÅŸte în realitate.

The origin of illness may be in the past, but the virulent crisis must be dynamically tackled. I believe in attacking the core of the illness, through its present symptoms, quickly, directly. The past is a labyrinth. One does not have to step into it and move step by step through every turn and twist. The past reveals itself instantly, in today's fever or abscess of the soul.

I love beauty but I find it easier to reject it now because I love other things more than beauty: genius, passion, nature–all of which are often manifested without beauty of form. I love ugliness because it expresses strength.

This openness, which is closed again as soon as we face a partial relationship, the one who understands only one part of us, is the miraculous openess which takes place in whole love.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write.

I don't really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.

I get furious at stairways, furious at doors, at walls, furious at everyday life which interferes with the continuity of ecstasy.

I have decided that if analysis is a hothouse, a hastening of wisdom and growth, nevertheless the life experience must be actually lived out and through, completely, in spite of it; everything that is lived out in the imagination is poison.

Believing in the danger which sprang from objects as well as people, which dress, which shoes, which coat demanded less of her panicked heart and body? For a costume was a challenge too, a discipline, a trap which once adopted could influence the actor.

You can only see in others what your nature allows you to see. The range of your vision depends on the extent of the personal development. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualize. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive instruments of discovery.

No rest for me anywhere. No rest from writing, awareness, insights, memories, fantasies, analogies, free associations. Writing becomes imperative for a surcharged head.

We give to others only peripheral improvisations. The plots, and themes of the music, like the plots and themes of our life, never alchemized into words, existed only in a state of music, stirring or numbing, exalting or despairing, but never named.

There are things one reads that make you aware that you have lived nothing, felt nothing, experienced nothing up to that time. How can i begin to feel - to feel? I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me.

then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer.

He held his steaming hands towards her, and she said, You are the god of fire

One does not learn to suffer less but to dodge pain.

Perfection is static, and I am in full progress.

Later he´ll be drunk in extremis and will only be able to speak the esperanto of alcoholics, which is a language full of stutterings from the geological layers of our animal ancestors