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.
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.
Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.
The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.
He left me at my hotel at 3:00 AM murmuring: "You're marvelous."
Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.
If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other, if only I could save you all from yourselves.
I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored. D. H. Lawrence began to give instinct a language, he tried to escape the clinical, the scientific, which only captures what the body feels.
Electric flesh-arrows traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.
You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers — you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance.
Everything but happiness is neurosis.
My ideas usually come not at the desk writing but in the midst of living.
Neurosis was caused by our attempt to separate physical and metaphysical levels, to set them up in opposition to each other, thus engaging in an internecine war. If it is true that we do live on several levels simultaneously- drama and action, past and present, personnel and collective- we are given ways to unify them: one by religion, the other by art. Separating such levels is only necessary when they conflict, and separation is a result of conflict. Seeing how these levels can work together in harmony is the task of our contemporary writers.
Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.
Only in the fever of creation could she recreate her own lost life.
Every word you wrote I ate, as if it were manna. Finding one's self in a book is a second birth; and you are the only one who knows that at times men behave like women and women like men, and that all these distinctions are mock distinctions.
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.