Quotes from Anais Nin

The romantic submits to life, the classicist dominates it.

because then the sum of experiences, of suffering, of self-analysis and soul-struggle have mellowed the individual and he can aid because he speaks and moves out of a ripe, conscious wisdom—not through precepts, ideas, formulas.

Henry:] Je pense à toi tous le temps.

You like feeling lost. You enjoy being baffled. It gives you a false sense of mental energy, activity.

O inimigo de um amor nunca vem de fora, não é homem ou mulher, é o que falta em nós mesmos.

I am a child compared to you, because when the womb in you speaks it enfolds everything—it is the darkness I adore.

Cabello rubio, tez pálida, demoníacas cejas angulares, una sonrisa cruel con un hoyuelo cautivador. Pérfida, infinitamente deseable, me atraía hacia ella como hacia la muerte.

You were back again into the old mysteries of the Jewish collective habit of thinking for effect, for protection of an amorphous, disunified ocean.

My friends—a Spanish painter, a guitarist, the tenor who has been staying with Joaquin, a poet, a homosexual, a Roumanian painter, an American composer, etc. etc.—they are all pained, injured, that I should defend Lawrence. Una mujer tan ideal, que lastima!

Me siento atrapada entre la belleza de June y el genio de Henry. De manera distinta, me entrego a los dos, una parte de mí para cada uno. Pero amo a June con locura, fuera de toda razón. Henry me da vida. June me da muerte. He de escoger y no puedo. Ofrecer a Henry todos los sentimientos que he experimentado respecto a June es exactamente como entregarme a él en cuerpo y alma.

And it could be successfully done by the technical trick (a justifiable one!) of maintaining the illusion, for the reader, that he is perusing an intimate journal, but doing your story with infinite care, infinite pains.

And I lie, Anaïs, when I tell you that I do not want to worship you.

Find the most salient, the most revelatory features of the story and expand them to the utmost, wring the last drop of juice from them.

Nós somos juízes muito mais severos dos nossos próprios atos. Julgamos nossos pensamentos, nossas intenções secretas e até nossos sonhos...

Incidentally, this is one of the worst defects in all the journal writing—this tacking on of recently digested syntheses. No syntheses, please! And in the finished work, no slippery escapes, no short, pithy, ambiguous lines or sentences. Full out, or else nothing.

I talked to your maid over the telephone and she didn't understand me very well, so I said," Vous étes espagnole, n'est-ce pas?" Alors, je suis M. Miller. Bon! Crazy, crazy. [. . .]

we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments.

The hours that go to the journal are an evasion, fundamentally, of the imminent, the ever-impending problem—that of mastering your medium, of becoming the artist you are.

are the only woman who has had a sense of gaiety, a wise tolerance—no more, you seem to urge me to betray you.

You need to write much much less and sweat more, go through agonies of torture in acquiring that craft which people less gifted than you or me have acquired earlier in their career.

You are really strong. I like even your deceit, your treachery. It seems aristocratic to me.

A veces, June, tengo que imaginar que estás ahí. Tengo la sensación de que quiero ser tú. Antes nunca había querido ser nadie más que yo. Ahora quiero fundirme en ti, estar tan cerca de ti que mi propio ser desaparezca.

In general there is too staccato, too jerky, too hectic and hysterical a use of the sentence. Too dramatic, all highlights, and little or no relief. Too much use of abstract terms, of abstract emotions. Often culminating in slightly ridiculous hyperboles

The resistance is the material, the events, the enigmas, the obscure motivations of the characters. Avoid grappling with these and you have a surface affair—a linear pattern, a solo melody in one key and monotonous and eventually exasperating. I ask myself, isn't it this precisely which gives a diary its essential character?