01c. 1940 ADI take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
02c. 1940 ADHow can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities?... I never feel the four walls around the substance of the self, the core. I feel only space. Illimitable space.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
03c. 1940 ADAnd in his eyes he had the look of the cat who inspires a desire to caress but loves no one, who never feels he must respond to the impulses he arouses.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
04c. 1940 ADThis great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes air, or swallows a snowflake, or yields to the sun.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
05c. 1940 ADShe abandoned herself to his whim, thinking it was to be an orgy of eyes and hands only.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
07c. 1940 ADThe truth is that this is the only way I can live: in two directions. I need two lives. I am two beings. When I return to Hugo in the evening, to the peace and warmth of the house, I return with deep contentment, as if this was the only condition for me. I bring home to Hugo a whole woman, freed of all 'possessed' fevers, cured of the poison of restlessness and curiosity which used to threaten our marriage, cured through action. Our love lives, because I live. I sustain and feed it. I am loyal to it, in my own way, which cannot be his way. If he ever reads these lines, he must believe me. I am writing calmly, lucidly while waiting for him to come home, as one waits for the chosen lover, the eternal one.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
08c. 1940 ADAnd 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.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
09c. 1940 ADPerhaps behind our occasional hostility toward the artist and writer there may be a slight tinge of jealousy. The man or woman who for the sake of family life, children, takes up work he does not like, disciplines himself, sacrifices some fantasy he had once, to travel or to paint, or even possibly to write, may feel toward the artist and writer a jealousy of his adventurous life. The artist and the writer have generally paid the full price for their independence and for the privilege of doing work they love, or for their artistic rebellions against standardized living or values.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
10c. 1940 AD[Y]ou have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
11c. 1940 ADConfront all the angry thoughts, feelings, the jealousies and condemnations, to find their cause, seek the root of such feelings and then operate on that. Need of security and reassurance can cause criminal acts.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
12c. 1940 ADWe are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
14c. 1940 ADEverything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. But I am more preoccupied with loving.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
15c. 1940 ADMen can be in love with literary figures, with poetic and mythological figures, but let them meet with Artemis, with Venus, with any of the goddesses of love, and then they start hurling moral judgments.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
16c. 1940 ADJune, you have killed my sincerity too. I will never again know who I am, what I am, what I love, what I want. Your beauty has drowned me, the core of me. You carry away with you a part of me reflected in you. When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You are the woman I want to be. I see in you that part of me which is you. I feel compassion for your childish pride, for your trembling unsureness, your dramatization of events, your enhancing of the loves given to you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madness.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
17c. 1940 ADThe mold we give to our lives is so that there will be no cataclysms. The order we seek we are willing to surrender to the flow of life at any time, but it is there as a brake on a car, and our health is a brake. We put brakes on, against our temperament. he said, “Even a room, arranged in a certain manner, prevents certain things from taking place in it.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
18c. 1940 ADThey courted the face on the screen, the face of translucence, the face of wax on which men found it possible to imprint the image of their fantasy.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
19c. 1940 ADStories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
20c. 1940 ADMy attraction to drugs is based on an immense desire to annihilate awareness.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
22c. 1940 ADI love you, June, and you know how acutely, how desperately. You know that no one can say or do anything to shake my love. I have taken you into myself, whole. You need have no fear of being unmasked, only loved.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
24c. 1940 ADDr Allendy said that it was necessary to become equal to life, that the romantic was defeated by life, really died of it, whether by tuberculosis in the old days, or by neurosis today. I had never thought before of the connection between neurosis and romanticism. Wanting the impossible? Dying when unable to reach it? Not wanting to compromise?Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
