Quotes from Anais Nin

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.

But we were lonely. we had nobody to play with. The gay child, the inventive child, the spirited and wild child, was lonely.

La alegría de las cosas pequeñas es todo cuanto tenemos para combatir lo trágico de la vida.

It astonishes me how delicately you can make distinctions between women. There was a marvellous paragraph on that. Among one hundred women you will distinguish five. It is more than Don Juan ever did.

Sink your lips in my skin (a needle penetrating silk.)

A marine snail gliding through the familiar city. Only in a dream could I move so gently along with the small human heartbeat in rhythm with the tug tug heartbeat of the tugboat, and Paris unfolding, uncurling, in beautiful undulations.

She had forced the hourglass of pain to turn. They had pursued each other. They had tried to possess each other. They had been slaves of a pattern, and not of love.

The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it.

I put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all.

I love my mystery, I love the abstract, fuyant world I live in as long as I don't begin my work, the forcing out of delicate, profound, vague, obscure, voluptuously wordless sensations into something you can seize on—perhaps never.

And what a joy again when, in the center of the madness, you say unexpectedly something very deep, the sudden illuminations of living, the lantern never quite blown out—I love that too.

I can see, I can see that it is in this distorted vision of the world's proper proportions that lies the secret of our fears. We make the animals bigger with our fears. We make our creations and our loves smaller, we shrink by our vision, and enlarge and shrink according to the whims of our interchangeable vision, not according to an immutable law of growth. The size of each world we live in is individual and relative, and the objects and people vary in each EYE.

I smile because I listen to the OTHER and I believe the OTHER. I am a marionette pulled by the unskilled fingers, pulled apart, inharmoniously dislocated, one arm dead, the other rhapsodising in mid-air. I laugh, not when it fits into my talk, but when it fits into the undercurrents of my talk.

I loved your breaking down that door, repeated Djuna. Through Rango she had breathed some other realm she had never attained before. She had touched through his act some climate of violence she had never known before.

Henry's daily and continuous flow of life, his sexual activity, his talks with everyone, his café life, his conversations with people in the street, which I once considered an interruption to writing, I now believe to be a quality which distinguishes him from other writers. He never writes in cold blood: he is always writing in white heat.

But I also hate Nietzsche. I wish you would tell me something that would make me understand him. I began with Zarathustra—fatuous language, and the world full of "tougher and merrier" men!

Yet my friend Natasha [Troubetskoia]† swears that Dostoevsky was a great liar and you could hardly find a Nastasia, an "idiot," or a Stavrogin in Russia.

Fools compare... the wise enjoy.

What unites us universally is our emotions, our feelings in the face of experience, and not necessarily the actual experiences themselves.

The fear that truth should prove uninteresting is known only to weak-stomached artists. Respect the mysteries, they say. Do not open Pandora's box. Poetic vision is not the outcome of blindness but of a force which can transcend the ugliest face of reality, swallow and dissolve it by its strength, not evasion.

Down the rusty bars of ladders to the undergrounds of the night propitious to the first man and woman at the beginning of the world. where there were no words by which to possess each other, no music for serenades, no presents to court with, no tournaments to impress and force a yielding, no secondary instruments, no adornments, necklaces, crowns to subdue, but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous, impaling of a woman on a man´s sensual mast

These rituals Rango could not sustain, for he could not maintain the effort to arrive on time since his lifelong habit had created the opposite habit: to elude, to avoid, to disappoint every expectation of others, every commitment, every promise, every crystallization.

The main thing is to feel your presence—hear you humming or yawning, see your combs & brushes lying around, worry about which dress you should put on, etc.

Psychoanalysis did save me because it allowed the birth of the real me, a most dangerous and painful one for a woman, filled with dangers; for no one has ever loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men.