01c. 1940 ADHuman beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
02c. 1940 ADIn the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again. What was she seeking to salvage from the daily current of living, what sudden revulsions drove her back into the solitary cell of the dream?Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
03c. 1940 ADI 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.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
04c. 1940 ADI often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
05c. 1940 ADI put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
07c. 1940 ADFor our anxiety is the one thing we cannot place on the shoulders of others, it suffocates them.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
08c. 1940 ADI never lose sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
11c. 1940 ADThe monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
12c. 1940 ADI 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 from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
13c. 1940 ADYou sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in spite of it, out of anything, any material given to him. The torments and hells of [crazy men], are not for you.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
14c. 1940 ADYou haven't loved yet," he said. "You've only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, illusion is not love, desire alone is not love. All these were paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
15c. 1940 ADYou are a real hermaphrodite, Mafouka,’ I said. 'That is what our age is supposed to have produced because the tension between the masculine and the feminine has broken down, people are mostly half of one and half of the other. But I have never seen it before—actually, physically. It must make you very unhappy.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
16c. 1940 ADMotherhood is a vocation like any other. It should be freely chosen, not imposed upon woman.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
17c. 1940 ADI do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
18c. 1940 ADFucking is an art. The mere fact of introducing the cock in the cunt and moving it in and out until the ejaculation of spunk is not art. True, it is fucking, but the difference between that way of doing it and the way it should be done, is like the difference between a child's first drawing and a picture by the world's greatest painter.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
19c. 1940 ADEven when they did not look at each other or speak to each other, he could feel a powerful current between them.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
20c. 1940 ADHe never treated her as a wife. He wooed her over and over again, with presents, flowers, new pleasures.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
21c. 1940 ADI gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
22c. 1940 ADEvery gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
23c. 1940 ADWhen she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts. Naked now, he lay his full length over her. She enjoyed his weight on her, enjoyed being crushed under his body. She wanted him soldered to her, from mouth to feet. Shivers passed through her body.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
