01UndatedThis diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
02UndatedI am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
04UndatedThe other night 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. You, in your books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with excitement that I expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated."Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying to live up to Dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
05UndatedA big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
06UndatedThe 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. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
07UndatedHenry's recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while walking the streets, traveling to see a friend; and life does not stop while he remembers. Analysis in movement. No static vivisection. Henry's daily and continuous flow of life, his sexual activity, his talks with everyone, his cafe life, his conversations with people in the street, which I once considered an interruption to writing, I now believe to be a quality which distinguishes him from other writers. He never writes in cold blood: he is always writing in white heat.It is what I do with the journal, carrying it everywhere, writing on cafe tables while waiting for a friend, on the train, on the bus, in waiting rooms at the station, while my hair is washed, at the Sorbonne when the lectures get tedious, on journeys, trips, almost while people are talking.It is while cooking, gardening, walking, or love-making that I remember my childhood, and not while reading Freud's 'Preface to a Little Girl's Journal.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
09UndatedThe possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
10UndatedYou have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
11UndatedWhen you're in my arms, I know you're mine. But your feet are so swift, so swift, they carry you as lightly as wings, I never know where, too fast, too fast away from me.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
12UndatedLove the great narcotic was the revealer in the alchemist's bottle rendering visible the most untraceable substances. Love the great narcotic was the agent provocateur exposing all the secret selves to daylight.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
13UndatedYou are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
14UndatedIn this instant of danger they realized they were each other's reason for living, and into this instant they threw their whole being.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
15UndatedSo many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost object, a misplaced unread book, cluttering the room like an attic with discarded possessions.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
16UndatedEvery word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
17UndatedAnd it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity...Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
18UndatedThe magic beauty of simultaneity, to see the loved one rushing toward you at the same moment you are rushing toward him, the magic power of meeting, exactly at midnight to achieve union, the illusion of one common rhythm achieved by overcoming obstacles, deserting friends, breaking other bonds - all this was soon dissolved by his laziness, by his habit of missing every moment, of never keeping his word, of living perversely in a state of chaos, of swimming more naturally in a sea of failed intentions, broken promises, and aborted wishesAnaïs Nin / quote ↗
19UndatedHis entire body was pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could she give him to cure his doubt?Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
20UndatedNo man and woman know what will be born in the darkness of their intermingling; so much besides children, so many invisible births, exchanges of soul and character, blossoming of unknown selves, liberation of hidden treasures, buried fantasies...Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
21UndatedThe potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
22UndatedEvery lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it, to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: "I don't understandAnaïs Nin / quote ↗
23UndatedThe fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
24UndatedHer presence had awakened in him a man suddenly whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in action.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
