Quotes from Anais Nin

He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot possess without loving.

I was shy, withdrawn, and read obsessionally. But I never wanted to be anyone else other than me.

I am made only for passion; it is the temperature of love that I cannot endure. I am afraid, and I think it is death- everything but passion seems like death to me. Only in fever do I feel life.

I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous.

As he sits there, I feel that I can see his mind as I see his body, and it is labyrinthine, fertile, sentient. I am loaded with adoration for everything that his head contains and for the impulses which blow in gusts.

For jaded people, the only pleasure left is to demolish others.

Viaggiamo per cercare altri luoghi, altre vite,m altre anime.

I thought of you again while reading The Brothers Karamazov (The Sensualists). Everything I read now has a different meaning, a terrible meaning; the way I read Dostoevsky anyway is not reading, it is actual passionate experience, as when I read you.

Rebellions of all kinds attract to their activities weaklings who rebel because they cannot master, destroy because they cannot create.

She wanted to be courted with mysterious language.

There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work.

I can only tell you that my surroundings are me. Everything is me, because I have rejected all conventions, the opinion of the world, all its laws. I am not obliged, as you and Jeanne are, to play a social role.

Read the Golden Ass of Apuleius and Les Diaboliques in French." . . . "Go to Russian Church on Rue Crimée for the music." . . . "Get back the first volume of Albertine and make annotations . . . write copiously, there is time for everything" . . . "Read Jacques Maritain.

Se o que Proust diz é verdade, que a felicidade é a ausência do delírio, então eu nunca conhecerei a felicidade. Pois que estou possuída por uma febre de conhecimento, experiência, criação.

The inner and poetic illumination of his life came from me.

The important thing is to set the passion free. The drama is everything, the cause of the drama nothing.

There is a spiral, in you, and in your books. Rich, richer than any writer or man yet known to me. You only need to do enough thinking to know where you are going, that is all.

That is where Rilke comes in . . . his angels. But Rilke is crazy. He has invented these angels. They are his angels, not of this world. They are German angels, with romantic wings and they float over the world in love until the wings are melted by the sun.

Quiero llevar a cabo mis propios descubrimientos. No necesito drogas ni estimulantes artificiales. Sin embargo quiero experimentar esas mismas cosas con June, penetrar en la maldad que me atrae. Busco la vida, y las experiencias que deseo; se me niegan porque tengo en mí una fuerza que las neutraliza. Conozco a June, la seudoprostituta, y se vuelve pura.

Es fácil crear la ilusión del amor. El otro te ayuda.

Perhaps we have built a false concept of wholeness and, under the pressure of an artificial unity, people like June explode and fly in all directions. Some day we may be reassembled into a more truthful whole.

The more broadly and expansively you love, without exclusiveness, the more you reach the mystic whole, the larger sense of love, the less individualistic, the more universal love.

El dolor es para superarlo, no para revolcarse en él.

We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task.