Quotes from Anais Nin

I wonder if the life I am leading is a dream or a reality. I feel far away from everything and everybody.

All the tragedy lay in trying to fit a boundless and insatiable love into human proportions, into one love.

You don't know what you are writing. You're like a painter who has gone blind to his work. Go out. Get on your bicycle. You need movement, rest.

There was in me confusion between love and devotion. I thought all my acts were acts of love, yielding up of the self, the personal. But I did feel hurt that they were all willing to immolate me, and felt unloved according to my own definition of love: sacrifice.

I am waiting for news from Ezra Pound and from Kay Boyle, to whom I sent carbons. They may make valuable suggestions.)

So illusion is delusion, and I have been Don Quixote, and nothing that I loved or dreamed existed. I am empty-handed now, a woman with an aching body. Lost. Weeping. Weeping. Saying yes to the analyst like a child.

America is in even greater danger because of its cult of toughness, its hatred of sensitivity, and someday it may have to pay a price for this, because atrophy of feeling creates criminals.

Too much mind, though, Henry! I do not like Goethe's complete transference into ideas. I do not like his second metamorphosis. That is not for you. You must, like me, turn it on and off.

I can only make notes. With Staff, it is my idealization of myself and others. Behind my masochism lies sadism. Behind my indirectness does not lie femininity, but a crippled, fearful self who does not dare. Behind my idealizations lie a primitive woman, indirect uses of power, subtle forms of destructiveness, this hunger.

You need to take language lessons from me, regularly and obediently, until I pronounce you cured.

Every other illness is understood, shared with other human beings. Not this one. It is mysterious and solitary, it is as ineffectual and unmoving to others as the attempted crying out of a mute person. Everybody understands hunger, physical pain, illness, poverty, slavery. But no one understands that this moment at which I crossed the street is more annhiliating than a concrete catastrophe. Anxiety is a woman screaming without a voice, out of a nightmare.

Had a cordial note from Dos Passos, in Key West, Fla., saying he would be delighted to receive a copy—but I'm not sending him one, for the reason given.)

This is not language, this is the world being turned inside out, not mathematically in super-dimensional planes, not artistically in violaceous daring, but biologically, atomically, so that not even the creator can any more recognize his world.

You might as well expect of Brancusi that he give us his masterpieces in fried bread crumbs or apple sauce. Can't be done.

I retract what I said about [Louis-Ferdinand Céline's] Voyage au Bout de la Nuit. You will have to read it in June. There are affinities there with your earlier work. It's another form of absolute, and therefore valuable.

I find these nobodies so much more interesting than the celebrated people. Why is that?

I can tell now about the breathing exercises, which at first caused anxiety, sobbing and pain, but which brought release, warmth and sensuality afterwards. There is confusion between femininity and masochism, a real split. The only release I had was sensual, and since it was the only release, I over-emphasized it and became a nymphomaniac.

The dream then, instead of being something apart from reality, a private world of fantasy or imagination, is actually an essential part of our reality which can be shared and communicated by means of imagery.

Every line is pregnant with meaning and however much the meaning is ransacked, the riddle will remain because only you can explain it, and this riddle is your last triumph—you will never reveal it.

If you look at language merely as craft you are committing lèse-majesté towards your own sacred tools. You've got to have the proper respect—you've got to feel awed in its presence (see, I say "awed," not "sacred").

That means for death, for the final catastrophe in which everything will be buried, because in the dissolution of death a flame is born whose secret is imparted only to those who are then and forever escaping the mould. The secret is incommunicable; it is that last knowledge to which we are driven by our most vital forces, the mystery which makes death not only supportable but desired. Etc. etc.

The Spaniard does not give his mind and soul to the woman! The Spaniard is the man who associates with man only in the building of a world.

I love the sharing. I feel with extraordinary vividness your presence, as if you were reading with me. I actually experience again the sensation of my leaning over your shoulder and kissing your hair and neck while you are reading or writing.

I can write above the melee, as it were, but I don't like the forced effort. It doesn't ring the way I want it to. I get off-key.