Quotes from Anais Nin

He failed to see that it contained at once all of Djuna's wishes which had been denied, and these wishes had flown from all directions to meet at this intersection and to plead once more for understanding.

Of course, you'll defend Jay, says Rango, He was a part of your former life, of your former values. I will never be able to alter that. I want you to think as I do. But Rango, you couldn't respect someone who surrendered an opinion merely to please you . It would be hypocrisy.

Yes, you have told me, over and over again, in a hundred different ways, but I am slow, Anaïs, slow perhaps because it is such delicious torture.

If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other, if only I could save you all from yourselves, said the modern Christ.

It shows that a woman is not really a critic but a penetrator. She does not judge, she understands.

He had appointed her not only guardian angel, but a member of his ideals.

Every disconnection is death.

You haven't loved yet... You've only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, desire alone is not love, illusion is not love, dreaming is not love. All these were paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way.

We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it... We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely.

Lillian's recurrent dream of a ship that could not reach the water, that sailed laboriously, pushed by her with great effort, through city streets, had determined her course toward the sea, as if she would give this ship, once and for all, its proper sea bed.

Night. The stars and the moon impassive, undisturbed, eternal. A little of their impassivity flows into me. They are consoling. They reduce the intensity and acuteness of human sorrow. I feel less strangled, less oppressed. I transfer to the moon and the stars some of the trust in God I once had, and realize that serenity comes from an acceptance of death. Man's life span is short. There is an end to pain.

I have run away with a part of my treasures, my memories, my obsession, with preserving, portraying, recording. All of us may die, but in these pages we will continue to smile, talk, make love.

Films are like a dose of opium, then as you come out in the street it's a shock, and you are brutally awakened from your dream. But when you stay, you never wake up. The dream goes on working. I would fall asleep for a while and then see images on the screen, and I could not tell the difference between the film and a dream.

I had to go out and drink a little because I was going nutty writing this stuff. You can't imagine what a turmoil is in my head, how much I want to say, and how little is coming out. My head is bursting.

it is in the moments of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately.

But my faith seems naive, at least today. Maybe tomorrow I can believe again.

Whatever tragic spirit lay behind this polished surface went into her singing, with which she tore people's serenity to shreds, spreading anxiety and regrets and nostalgia everywhere.

Strings of chili hung from the rafters, chili to wake them from their dreams, dreams born of scents and rhythms, and the warmth that fell from the sky like the fleeciest blanket.

The duality which you divine is the despair, the bankruptcy of logic and philosophy; it is the illusion which holds the human planetary system together.

He says: 'The capitalistic world killed the artist in me.' He sees as coming from outside all that comes from inside. I know the artist in him must have been very weak to be defeated by this obstacle at all. Limitations, restrictions, defeats, come from within. I am fully responsible for my own restrictions.

Doubt tortures me. There is a twist in me, my fear of interpretation.

Malraux says art is our rebellion against man's fate. La condition humaine is what I have never accepted. That is why I tried to create my own world.

I don't like superior attitudes based on well-poised intellect. I hate well-poised intellects.

People feel that in her, the nonhuman. People are afraid of her. Something in her inspires a nonhuman attachment. Sur elle, the human feelings seem to slip, they glisser—