Quotes from Anais Nin

Curious, that wine which did not go to one's head. Or were our heads impermeable to all but music and words? So it seems.

I don't send you any more pages because they're not finished. I'm searching for a phrase that will release everything that's pent up in me.

The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence. Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams, and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.

The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment. No moment of charm without long roots in the past, no moment of charm is born on bare soil, a careless accident of beauty, but is the sum of great sorrows, growths, and efforts.

I have dreamed of that over and over—I dancing with you, or you alone dancing with head thrown back and eyes half shut.

Without the most humble and sedulous grappling with the inner defects there can never be any real mastery—and the most beautiful efforts will come to nought.

The root of all dissention between friends is the quality of idealism contained in it.

Yes, Anaïs, I want to demask you. I am too gallant with you. I want to look at you long and ardently, pick up your dress, fondle you, examine you. Do you know I have scarcely looked at you? There is still too much sacredness clinging to you.

Quiero ser un poeta fuerte, tan fuerte como Henry y John en su realismo. Quiero combatirlos, invadirlos y aniquilarlos.

Anaïs, you've started the sap flowing. I am not responsible for what I say or do any more.

Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm.

Just that divine understanding and unique responsiveness and clairvoyance, the match to my mind.

I want the key, the key to the lies." "Passion and violence never opened a human being." "What opens human beings?" "Compassion.

Yes, Anaïs, I was thinking how I could betray you, but I can't. I want you. I want to undress you, vulgarize you a bit—ah

I fly, I crawl, I weep, I laugh, I swim, I grow, I fall, I need, I want, I follow, I break, I sink, I love, I exist.

I have become an idiot like Gertrude Stein. That's what love does to intelligent women. They cannot write letters anymore.

Cuando miro tu rostro, quisiera dejarme llevar y compartir tu locura, que llevo dentro de mí como un secreto y no puedo seguir disimulando. Siento una aguda y pavorosa alegría. Es la alegría que se siente cuando se ha aceptado la muerte y la desintegración, una alegría más terrible y más profunda que la alegría de vivir, de crear

We write to taste life twice

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

Description of yourself walking through Paris and the tips of your breasts taut and tingling. Feeling, as I read your book, that for the first time I was going to know what are a woman's sensations in love . . . Asking myself over and over, does she look at men always with those steady eyes? . . .

And there were other times I felt only your mind, and your mind is slippery, it gets between my thoughts and I have to squirt sand or the wheels will slip. . .

So many Anaïses you have shown me—and now this one—as if to prove your protean versatility.

But I see New York written all over it. Ennui. Futility. Dreary nights. Sad jokes. Creamy voices. Crooning melodies.

Then the anger about blaming society for the situation in which we find ourselves — blaming, say, man for the situation in which woman finds herself. I don't believe in that because I believe very much our double responsibility, that we engage ourselves in destructive relationships, that we have a part of the responsibility, unconsciously.