01c. 1940 ADJazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body’s breath, and the strings’ wails and moans are echoes of the body’s music. It is the body’s vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
02c. 1940 ADThe relief of opening one's hand and letting go was immense. But soon after, I tightened again. A desire for revenge, a strange revenge.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
03c. 1940 ADDjuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one...Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
05c. 1940 ADI walked into my own book, seeking peace.It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
06c. 1940 ADThe origin of illness may be in the past, but the virulent crisis must be dynamically tackled. I believe in attacking the core of the illness, through its present symptoms, quickly, directly. The past is a labyrinth. One does not have to step into it and move step by step through every turn and twist. The past reveals itself instantly, in today’s fever or abscess of the soul.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
07c. 1940 ADThere is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
08c. 1940 ADThere are women’s voices that sound like poetic, unearthly echoes. Then they change. The eyes change. I believe that all these legends about people changing into animals at night – like the stories of the werewolf, for instance – were invented by men who saw women transformed at night – from idealized, worshipful creatures into animals and thought that they were possessed.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
09c. 1940 ADHe, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
10c. 1940 ADWe write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it... We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
11c. 1940 ADEach friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
12c. 1940 ADI must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
13c. 1940 ADThere is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
14c. 1940 ADWe speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
15c. 1940 ADI feel a little like the moon who took possession of you for a moment and then returned your soul to you. You should not love me. One ought not to love the moon. If you come too near me, I will hurt you.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
17c. 1940 ADWe are punctual, a stressed, marked characteristic. We need order around us, in the house, in the life, although we live by irresistible impulses, as if the order in the closets, in our papers, in our books, in our photographs, in our souvenirs, in our clothes could preserve us from chaos in our feelings, loves, in our work. Indifference to food, sobriety; but this, we admit, is the part of the war against a threatening fragility.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
18c. 1940 ADWhat you call your lies are fiction and myths. The art of creating a disguise can be as beautiful as the creation of a painting… I created a woman for my artist life, bold, gay, courageous, generous, fearless; and another to please my father, a clear-sighted woman with a love of beauty, harmony, and self-discipline, critical and selective; and still another who lives in chaos, embraces the weak and the stumbling and the confused.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
19c. 1940 ADShe had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness...A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
20c. 1940 ADWhen you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructiveAnaïs Nin / quote ↗
21c. 1940 ADWarmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
22c. 1940 ADInnocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
23c. 1940 ADHow well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between.Anaïs Nin / quote ↗
24c. 1940 ADLater he´ll be drunk in extremis and will only be able to speak the esperanto of alcoholics, which is a language full of stutterings from the geological layers of our animal ancestorsAnaïs Nin / quote ↗
