Quotes from Anais Nin

One word I would banish from the dictionary is 'escape.' Just banish that and you'll be fine. Because that word has been misused regarding anybody who wanted to move away from a certain spot and wanted to grow. He was an escapist. […] You have a right to experiment with your life.

When Allendy says, "I am cold and grey," I sense the obscure, buried, sunken, eclipsed man who was stifled by his mother. No one was ever born without that light or flame of life. Some event, some person stifles or drowns it altogether.

Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do anything mad for her, anything she asked of me. Henry faded. She was color, brilliance, strangeness.

No vemos las cosas como son, las vemos como somos

Una vida de liberación de los instintos se compone de diferentes estratos. El primero conduce al segundo, el segundo al tercero y así sucesivamente. Al final, se llega a los placeres anormales.

I hope you never marry a man you don't love sexually. That is what I have done. I love everything about him, the way he behaves, his face, his body, the way he works, treats me, his thoughts, his way of smiling, talking, everything except the sexual man in him. I thought I did, before we married.

Perfidious, infinitely desirable, drawing me to her as towards death.

To say that the artist is not serving humanity is monstrous. He has been the eyes, the ears, the voice of humanity. He was always the transcendentalist who x-rayed our true states of being. His role in European culture is clear enough. Here he is given an inferior status, because he is not obviously and directly useful. His usefulness cannot be measured. The artist cannot serve directly.

As if rising with her in his gyroscope of fantasy he took her to visit his collection of empty cages.

he words we did not shout, the tears unshed, the curse we swallowed, the phrase we shortened, the love we killed, turned into magnetic iron ore, into tourmaline, into pyrite agate, blood congealed into cinnabar, blood calcinated, leadened into galena, oxidized, aluminized, sulphated, calcinated, the mineral glow of dead meteors and exhausted suns in the forest of dead trees and dead desires.

Man seems powerless to face the truth or the relative truth stripped of all adornment.

Sabina placed The Firebird on the phonograph. The delicate footsteps of the Firebird were heard at first through infinite distance, each step rousing the phosphorescent sparks from the earth, each note a golden bugle to marshal delight. A jungle of dragon tails thrashing in erotic derisions, a brazier of flesh-smoking prayers, the multiple debris of the stained glass fountains of desire.

In all of us there is human weakness. The friend is the one who goes out to strengthen this weakness, but not to attack it.

You are like me, wishing for such perfect moments, and frightened for fear of spoiling them.

I do not hold on now. I live openly, ready for the pain, the separations and losses. I am not holding on. Open and free, sad at moments, but knowing the deep joys are worth all that follows. Deep joys. One must be willing to suffer, to surrender.

Her hair was full of lights

Are you sad? Do you want me to leave? - I'm not sad, but I'm blocked. My whole past seems to stop me. I can't let go. I feel as if I can inhale but not exhale. I'm just constrained, unnatural.

I realized that for me it is only and always the "literary" appeal that people and places make. The reality is void of interest. Flat.

I think now that at the root of all my writing lies the fact that very early in life I lost the desire to participate with others on the basis laid down by society. All I have been doing, possibly, in my work, is to protest and explain wherein I'm different.

A única luz provinha de uma estufa para onde o salão dava. Estava repleta de plantas tropicais, rodeando um lago cheio de peixes dourados. Um caminho de seixos circundava o lago. O sol, filtrado através das folhas verdes, projectava uma sumida luz esverdeada, como se eu estivesse no fundo do oceano. Tudo aquilo parecia apto a abandonar a luz do dia comum para explorar os mundos submersos.

the legends of friendship and love between man and man, woman and woman, or man and woman, lies this hideous narcissistic image of the single, all-sufficient self, the primitive generative force which fecundates itself, which in its irrepressible ebullience threw off a planetary system that forms the whole corpus of mythological worship and love. "In the beginning was the word and the word became flesh.

The idea of deserving love. And then watching love being given to people who did nothing to deserve it.

I was not travelling away from human life, I was seeking my own fulfillment. Searching for heightened moments uninterrupted by life's daily exigencies.

For the first time I have conquered restlessness, my imagination does not wander to all the far places towards all the far strangers, questing, expecting what? For the first time my body and soul are together, and the sound of a window closing, a door closing, is no more alarming than the wings of an icon closing over a figure praying.