Quotes from Anais Nin

The diary had been her refuge, her workshop, and the act of writing her only stabilizer. "The journal is a product of the disease, perhaps an accentuation and exaggeration of it. I speak of relief when I write—perhaps—but it is also an engraving of pain, a tattooing on myself, a prolongation of pain.

We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our cultures, our religions.

Os fios telefônicos carregavam apenas mensagens literais, nunca os gritos subterrâneos de angústia, de desespero. Como os telegramas, eles entregavam apenas golpes finais e finitos: chegadas, partidas, nascimentos e mortes, mas nenhum espaço para fantasias como: Long Island é uma tumba e mais um dia nela iria provocar asfixia.

Él cuenta con que yo entenderé, porque yo, como él, soy escritora. He de saber. Debe estar claro para mí. Para su sorpresa, le digo exactamente lo que tú dices: «No es lo mismo.» Hay un mundo eternamente cerrado para él, el mundo que contiene nuestras conversaciones abstractas, nuestros besos, nuestros éxtasis.

But perhaps Rank is right and humility is an atonement for your great inner pride and knowingness about your self!

I thought how much this meant to me, and that it was what I really felt about D. H. Lawrence, and that it was the darkness which attracted me . . . don't you think it ‹ so about Lawrence?

The more hunger, the greater the desires

And another reason why I could not live with Dostoevsky alone, and had to find something else, is that in Lawrence the "darkness" was mostly sexual—and there is not quite enough sexuality in Dostoevsky.

P.S. The excerpts will follow in the next mail. Just read Unamuno! My Unamuno! Where is that tragic sense of life? I want it. I may write on Gide's Dostoevsky tomorrow. Everything is stirring in me—Fraenkel, Proust, Unamuno, Osborn, Lawrence

the writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement.

a beautiful voice that haunted people

The Mystic of Sex" (an essay on D. H. Lawrence published pseudonymously in The Canadian Forum, in October 1930), and its offspring, the "Unprofessional Study" of D. H. Lawrence, published in 1932, reflect her own urgent needs to express her sexuality, to reorder the framework of her marriage, as much, perhaps, as they were a passionate defense (the first by a woman) of a much maligned fellow artist.

On se penetre non par les sensations mais par la pensée, I wonder.

he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work.

What he asked was not the caprice of a lover, but the desire of a painter, of an artist. His eyes were hungry for her beauty.

She was blinded, deafened, made senseless.

No es de extrañar que yo observe su vida y me dé cuenta de que la mía nunca se parecerá a la de él, porque la mía la retiene el pensamiento.

I feel that an initial shock has shattered my wholeness, that I am like a shattered mirror. Each piece has gone off and developed a life of its own. They have not died from the shock (as, in some cases I have seen, women who died from betrayals, go into mourning, abdicate all love, never renew contact with man again), but separated into several selves, and each one developed a life of its own.

Pouvoir, au milieu de la folie, redevenir humaine et pitoyable.

Goethe—it's amusing how we agree about Goethe. The man who sought out serenity and sanity. I hardly know him, and I hate him.

I have no fear of your femaleness.

The pages were all right—neither good nor bad, neither fish nor fowl. As I read them I seemed to hear the original lines from which they were abstracted, saw the wavering handwriting, and the curious childlike drawings, the mistakes, the bad spelling, the ink spots, the greasy finger-prints, the cheap paper (which is so touching in itself—the cheapest for genius always!). I rebelled

No sabes lo que es la sensualidad. Hugo y yo sí. Está en nosotros, no en tus pervertidas prácticas; está en el sentimiento, la pasión, el amor.»

Además, dado que es inteligente, comprende que a aquellos que son como yo no se les puede seducir sin ilusión. Y él no puede molestarse en crear ilusiones.