Anais Nin Quotes
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willingness to explore everything is a sign of strength. The weak ones have prejudices. Prejudices are a protection.
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Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.
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It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it.
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Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.
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I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.
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"We see the world as 'we' are, not as 'it' is; because it is the "I" behind the 'eye' that does the seeing."
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Anxiety is loves greatest killer.
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Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once.
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Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.
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The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.
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Asia discovered two remedies for the cruelty of man, art and religion. America discarded both and is drowning in hate and aggressivity.
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We see things the way we are, not the way they are.
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The two men who have done the greatest harm to the world are Christ and Columbus. Christ taught us guilt and sacrifice, to live only in the other world, and Columbus discovered America and materialism.
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I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again. ANAÏS NIN, Fire: From "A Journal of Love" The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1938 For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration.
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I looked at it [revolver] as if it reminded me of a crime I had committed with an irrepressible smile such as rises sometimes to people’s lips in the face of great catastrophes which are beyond their grasp, the smile that comes at times on certain women’s faces while they are saying they regret the harm they have done. It is the smile of nature quietly and proudly asserting its natural right to kill.
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And silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxication life, instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions, mathematics of emotion in place of violent impact, the volcanic eruptions of fever, lust and delight.
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I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness.
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The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. Albert Einstein It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
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Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it.
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gold never comes to the dreamers - except in dreams.
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I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
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I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood.
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I palliate the sufferings of others. yes I see myself as softening the blows, dissolving acids, neutralizing poisons, every moment of the day. I try to fulfill the wishes of others, to perform miracles. I exert myself performing miracles.
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Convalescence. Such an utter weakness that you lie like an animal hibernating, playing possum. You float. You are adrift. Every current is stronger than you.
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One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.
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We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in modern life. That is our tragedy. Once I wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only absolute act left to do, for what is most powerful in me is the craving for purity, greatness.
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The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world.
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New York has an electronic heart.
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I don't wish power, only art -art and passion.
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He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself. . . . For him the only danger came from the microbes that attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which eats into the soul.
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