Anais Nin (1903 – 1977)
Born Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, was a French-born author of Spanish, Cuban, and Danish descent who became famous for her published journals, which span more than sixty years, and for her erotica.
He left me at my hotel at 3:00 AM murmuring: "You're marvelous."
The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.
Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.
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.
Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and to art.
Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.
To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.
Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment.
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
In 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.
The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.
No desire of the body, but for what lies in there, what lies in the flesh, the world, the thought, the creation, the illumination.
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!
The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted.
I feel a fatigue of the tongue seeking to utter impossible things until it twists itself into a knot and chokes me. I feel a fatigue at this mass of nerves seeking to uphold a world that is falling apart. I feel a fatigue at feeling, at the fervor of my dreams, the fever of my thought, the intensity of my hallucinations. A fatigue at the sufferings of others and my own. I feel my own blood thundering inside of me, I feel the horror of falling into abysms. But you and I would always fall together and I would not be afraid. We would fall into abysms, but you would carry your phosphorescences to the very bottom of the abysms. We could fall together and ascend together, far into space. I was always exhausted by my dreams, not because of the dreams, but because of the fear of not being able to return. I do not need to return. I will find you everywhere. You alone can go wherever I go, into the same mysterious regions. You too know the language of the nerves. You will always know what I am saying even if I do not.
I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes.
Human 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.
Ecstasy is the moment of exaltation from wholeness!