Quotes
Quotes by Anaïs Nin from her diaries and novels.
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."
"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."
"I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life. Les Jeux."
"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see.
The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."
"When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others."
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."
"MIDNIGHT. AFTER AN OPERA. ALL EVENING, WHILE I HEARD THE MUSIC, I had dreams about myself, dreams of beauty, of intellectual achievements, of grace, expression in dancing, of passionate, desperate living. I felt myself burning
with delirious fever; I saw myself at home, at teas, on the stage, in various countries, writing, dancing, moving, changing, changing. I was everywhere, I was everything, everybody. MY LIFE HAD NO LIMITS, NO BOUNDARIES, NO END. The more I dreamed, the deeper grew my fever, until I suddenly realized I was dazzling myself with myself."
"And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
OCT 23 1932 "I always believed it was the artist in me who ensorcelled. I believed it was my esoteric house, the colors, the lights, my costumes, my work. I always stood within the great active-artist shell, timorous and unconscious of my power."
"I can relinquish the demands of my ego, capitulate to art, to creation--above all to creation."
"One cannot expose the true self everywhere, at anytime."
In a note to Dr. Rene' Allendy "It is not only the cure of the individual, but that in curing it, you reveal the worlds which lie beyond the ego. This liberation from the ego is what seems to me your most precious gift to me. And it is only thenone begins to love."
"Such scrupelness. How many of us have been guilty of not being ourselves, yet none of us would have taken such care to confess it, to atone for it."
From ANAIS NIN OBSERVED: A Film Portrait of a Woman as Artist by Robert Snyder
"Art must be for woman like a personified ancient ritual where every spiritual thought is made visible, enacted, represented. Art must be like a miracle... art is a miracle."
"My feet were treading paper and a stairway of ivory piano notes. These were the streets of my own diary, crossed with bars of black notes. I was lost in the labrynth of my confessions among the veiled faces of my acts...I heard the evening prayer, the cry of solitude recurring every night...Enormous rusty keys opened each volume, and the figures passed and vanished, armless or headless, mutilated, as I had unburied them. The white orifice of the endless cave opened. On the rim of it stood a little girl eleven years old carrying the diary in a little basket."
"I don't know how far my memory wants to go today. But the water makes me think of my first break with my roots: taking the ship from Spain to America, which is when the diaries began. That was my first journey; a journey which was also a bridge. A breaking of a bridge with Europe and with my father... I don't know but it must have been since that time that I kept the love of water as the most important element of my life. The idea of travel... perhaps the idea of returning to Europe. Because I associated all travel with ships, I have a great love of ships, a great love of journeys. So I'd say it began with a voyage, which was a loss and a breaking away from one continent to go to another continent."
"The diary deals always with the immediate present, the warm, the near, being written at white heat develops a love of the living moment. One thing is very clear-- that both diary and fiction tend toward the same goal: intimate contact with people, with experiences, with life itself."
"I LIKE TO FEEL THAT I HAVE TRANSCENDED MY DESTINY."
'WOMAN OF NEW YORK' from the writings in THE MYSTIC OF SEX
"The characteristic aspect of the women of New York is that they are in motion, perpetually active and that one would have to photograph them at a speed used for ballet dancers or athletes. Coming from above, say in a helicopter, we see first on the twenty-fourth floor of one of the highest buildings facing the United nations, Mrs. Millie Johnstone who initiated the first Japanese Tea Ceremony School in New York, to counterbalance its hectic, frenzied activity. Her apartment, one of the most beautiful in New York, is decorated with some of her own tapestries evoking the bethlehem Steel Works of her husband, with collages by Varda, wool rugs from Peru, and has a view of the Hudson which seems like a view from a transatlantic liner. One room is shuttered by a trellis of wood and frosted glass, subdued and simple. It is a japanese room, in the style of classical Japanese austerity. A low couch, filtered light, a platform covered by a grass mat for the tea ceremony, the utensils, the pots, the cups, the brush, the spoon, the napkin, the wafer. Mrs. Johnstone dispenses the calm and serenity of the ritual in a blue kimono. Having been a dancer she is very graceful and her New England profile melts into the formal design expected of Oriental stylization. She feels that modern men and women need to learn repose and meditation to sustain themselves in a city of frenzy."
WHAT I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO HAVE BEEN
Eternally a woman of thirty, full-breasted, tall, black hair, Oriental-Spanish eyes and aquiline nose--very pale--exotic looking--extremely experienced--author of five or six books of five or six different kinds (synthetic resume of all interesting attitudes)--unmarried (lovers permitted)--rich enough to help out writers and publish a magazine--a great traveller. At thirty-one I would meet Hugh and have two children (Hugh being the only man I would like to have children from) and sit in an old garden like this one (Louveciennes) and be really happy." - *A note written by Anais Nin at the age of twenty-seven, at the end of Volume 30 of her original diary in 1930.
THE LITTLE GIRL IN YELLOW
Sitting alone at the tennis club (Cercle du Bois) drowsy after a game, I watched the children playing and saw a little girl I wanted to have--an eery child with a secret smile at thoughts of her own, running lightly to dry her hands which she had dipped in the lake. I must be beaten, I thought sadly, for I am beginning to want to pass my life on to another. Until now I never wanted children. I called them interruptions, renunciations, knowing too well that they might be neither like Hugh nor myself, not even perhaps an extension or development of our ideals, but a mere repetition of ordinary patterns... Yet this child fascinated me. She drew me out of myself--perhaps that was the blessing. I chased after her fragile self, in yellow, red, left all my weariness far away...She was happy to have wet hands, she was happy because the sun was drying them, she was happy to be running. All of a sudden she stood before me, wide-eyed, startled, her arms open, her little yellow dress fluttering. I felt a second of struggle, as if the child were demanding a kind of surrender. And though my body was sore with passion, with hunger, with pain, I smiled, and she liked my smile and ran away, and ran back and around my chair, until her mother called her back.
Jamais je me donnerais entierement a rien...Jamais je n'echapperais a moi-meme, ni par l'amour, ni par la maternite, ni par l'art. Mon "moi" est comme le Dieu des croyants faibles, qui le voient partout, toujours, et ne pueve fuire cette bantise et cette vision."*
I have desired self-perfection and greatness, a very immense conceit--and now I am crushed by the weight of my ambition. I would like to pass the burden to a child.
*English translation*
I will never give myself entirely to anything...I will never escape from myself, neither through love, nor motherhood, nor art. My self is like the God of those of little faith, who see him everywhere, always, and cannot flee this obsession and this vision."
FROM HOUSE OF INCEST
"She led me into the house of incest. It was the only house whaich was not included in the twelve houses of the zodiac. It could neither be reached by the route of the Milky Way, nor by the glass ship through whose transparent bottom one could follow the outline of the lost continents, nor by following the arrows pointing the direction of the wind, nor by following the voice of the mountain echoes."
"FEZ. One always, sooner or later, comes upon a city which is an image of one's inner cities. Fez is an image of my inner self. This may explain my fascination for it. Wearing a veil, full and inexhaustible, labyrinthian, so rich and variable I myself get lost. Passion for mystery, the unknown, and for the infinite, the unchartered."
"Memory makes a tremendous voyage. But we never lose the child in us."
"No life, no history, no human being, no event is without meaning. But it takes a certain training to penetrate the surface and we mistake superficiality for realism."
"Our psychological reality, which lies below the surface, frightens us because it endlessly surprises us and drives us in a direction which society's rules and organizations define as wrong or dangerous. When experiencing such fears, the conscious mind tries first of all to control the unconscious by repression. When it cannot be repressed, it rebels. When it rebels, it may lead either to madness or to life."
"ONLY FULLNESS RISES"
"To write without feeling is to miss the one element which animates every line with life."
"BEWARE...LOVE NEVER DIES OF A NATURAL DEATH"
"Sometimes one must pursue one's attractions. The concept of the LABYRINTH attracted me. IT REPRESENTED, FIRST OF ALL, MYSTERY. One was lost in a maze. THE UNCONSCIOUS IS A MAZE. One does not know with the conscious mind, clearly; where one is going. THERE ARE MANY DETOURS."
"Action without meaning becomes animal. The dream without action is equally destructive."
"WRITING ITSELF IS OFTEN A WAKING DREAM."
"I want to dance and laugh. I want to dance. Nothing will shatter my individual world. No storm or sea on earth."
"SELF-KNOWLEDGE IS AT THE ROOT OF UNDERSTANDING AND WISDOM."
"I have the capacity to live several lives--one does not satisfy me."
"I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me."
"LIVING NEVER WORE ONE OUT SO MUCH AS THE EFFORT NOT TO LIVE."
"Systems are corruptible but not the creative self, not the self and not the world that is created on a human basis."
"Permit yourself to flow and overflow. Allow for the rise in temperature and all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess."
"It's a million times better to risk being deserted or betrayed than to withdraw into a fortress of alienation, shut the door and break the contact with others. Because then we really die. That is death. that is emotional death."
"I took everything in, and the more you take in the more strength you find waiting to accomplish things and to expand your life."
"I go in to come out."
"What you give isn't lost."
"You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too."
"What happens if we don't have this very strong inward life is that external events just simply cause you to break down, to collapse."
"You see we make everything rigid and it's all out of fear; we make these rigidities and then we can't live in them and we suffocate in them. ...to get security we give up our freedom."
"You should not give anybody the power to decide what is right and wrong in your creativity."
"And when I speak of neurosis I really mean nothing more than what we used to call romanticism: that is, wanting the impossible and then being unhappy if it was found to be impossible."
"The neurotic suffering comes with this creativity and this growth is frustrated either by social conditions, family conditions, educational conditions, whatever the atmosphere is."
"If we could but make friends with our inner selves, come to terms with our own darkness, then there would be no trouble from without."
"So I want to stress the importance of the wish. The real magical element is the wish, and if we don't know the wish then we stumble about and we accept entrapment because we don't really know what we are going towards."
"Every difficult situation into which you are sometimes thrown has some kind of opening somewhere, even if it is only by way of the dream."
"I don't want to be a tourist in the world of images. I want to create something with them."
"In wanting to protect ourselves, we often really entomb ourselves."
"But I think the greatest problem we have -- and I'm sure you have it too -- is the fear of someone reading over our shoulders, of someone passing judgment on our secret selves."
"It may seem to us, in terms of our conventional idea of loyalty, that it is disloyalty to look with complete honesty at a person we love."
"If you live passionately, you're bound to get into confused states"
"If you're negative, you're going to find causes for negativity"
"I always used art to put myself together again, and that is why I favored the artist, because I learned from him this creating out of nothing."
“Life would be more bearable if I looked at it as an adventure and a tale"
"We will always have a conflict between our growth and our fear that that growth will overshadow or injure someone else"
"What came under the heading of PLEASURE in Mr. Hansen's library, here was categorized as ABERRATIONS, SADISM, MASOCHISM, PERVERSIONS, ABNORMALITIES, etc. And I wondered whether Dr. Allendy, in having to look upon the sexual habits of his patients as symptoms or clinical problems, did not lose his interest in sex."
"Art was the prescription for sanity and relief from the terrors and pains of human life."
"In chaos there is fertility."
"What we fear might happen, does happen"
"The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others -- an admirable image."
"The important thing is to set the passions free."
"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. there is always more mystery."
"Don't wait for it. Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you , then it comes to you."
"Two bracelets. Duality? Two Loves? One representing the woman who waned to be enslaved (slave's bracelet), the other to bind the other, the one I loved?"
"I mastered the mechanisms of life the better to bend it to the will of the dream."
"Everyone is jealous. Some admit it, others do not. It is a perversity to be jealous of the past because the past is usually made of ashes."
"Absurdity is the reaction of the intellect to events, it is not poetry or fantasy."
"Neurosis, sickness, the malady consists in remaining fixed in a trend of thoughts which is destructive, a wallowing in all the negative, frustrating aspects of one's life. For example, dwelling on what one cannot obtain, on one's defeats, on a desire for unlimited power"
"She wanted to be cruel, she understood how one could torture the loved one for the pleasure of consoling him."
"In the infinite there is no impasse."
"If enough people struggle against limitations of all kinds the world would be altered anyway, and changes made from the inside"
"Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession."
"It is only in such human relationships that one insists on one's own identity and separation from myths."
"Discovering other' weaknesses is not going to prove your strength. We all have weaknesses...The friend is the one how goes out to strengthen this weakness, but not to attack it."
"We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us."
"I am like a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough."
"The first steps towards freedom are defiant and awkward."
"When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow."
"In order to change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard."
"We are never trapped unless we choose to be."
"When he heard one of his friends say: 'I would love to have this or that' he would get it for him immediately, not at Christmas or New Years. He remembered that a pleasure too long awaited is a lost pleasure."
"Any dependence causes anxiety. Because one is living through another and fears the loss of the other."
"No one can live with only a clinical, psychological, or historical vision of the world. there must be a capacity to recreate, renovate, renew."
"The secret of joy is the mastery of pain."
"The tragic aspect of love appears only when one tries to fit boundless love into a limited one."
"As children, we are made to feel we will only be loved if we are good (in the parent's terms). As soon as we begin to affirm our real selves, parents begin to reject us. We grow up with the idea that if we are ourselves we will be rejected. So, as artists, in our work e express our real self. But we keep the fear of not being loved for this real self. And timidity and shyness are the symptoms. A timidity we can overcome with those who understand and accept us. Now when I have to face the world with my real self expose in he writing, there is a crisis. Am I going to be accepted, approved, loved, or punished and rejected? Hence the fear."
"The greatest suffering does not come from living, from mirages, from the unattainable dreams of Don Quixote, but from AWAKENING. There is no greater pain that awakening from a dream."
"Under cover of seduction, one avoids being controlled, influenced, possessed."
"Too great an emphasis on technique arrests naturalness."
"Very little is created out of hatred."
"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."
"People always blame external circumstances for their disintegration."
"Under cover of seduction, one avoids being controlled, influenced, possessed."
"Too great an emphasis on technique arrests naturalness."
"Very little is created out of hatred."
"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."
"People always blame external circumstances for their disintegration."
"I had expected a man for the demonstration of sixty-six ways of making love. Henry barters over the price. The women smile. The big one has bold features, raven black hair in curls which almost hide her face. The smaller one has a pale face with blonde hair. They are like mother and daughter. They wear high-heeled shoes, black stockings with garters at the thighs, and loose open kimonos. They lead us upstairs. They walk ahead, swinging their hips." (from Journals 1931-1934)
"This High Place where I am writing is a blessing, a refuge, a tower from which I can look down on my life without disturbance, a place of meditation, concentration, where I can gather anew my scattered strength and splintered control... Here, peace, solitude. My writings are all parading on the shelf. My typewriter is on the green garden table with blank paper and carbon paper. I enjoy life. Especially on mornings when I begin to carry out a new and firm resolution."
“I REALIZE THAT I AM TOO PERSONAL-- THAT ALL OF MY WRITING SPRINGS FROM MYSELF."
"Lina is a liar who cannot bear her real face in the mirror. She has a face that proclaims sensuality, lightning in her eyes, an avid mouth, a provocative glance. Bur instead of yielding to her eroticism she is ashamed of it. She throttles it. And all of this desire, lust, gets twisted inside her and churns a poison of envy and jealousy. Whenever sensuality shows its blossom, Lina hates it. She is jealous of everything, of everybody else's loves. She is jealous when she sees couples kissing in the streets of Paris, in the cafes, in the park. She looks at men with a strange look of anger. She wishes nobody would make love because she can't do it.
"She bought herself a black lace nightgown like mine. She came to my apartment to spend a few nights with me. She said she had bought the nightgown for a lover, but I saw the price tag still fastened to it. She was ravishing to look at because she was plump and her breasts showed where her white blouse opened. I saw her wild mouth parted, her curly hair in an aureole around her head. Every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come in the room."
- "Lina" from Little Birds
"I feel inexhaustible! Tonight I will love my Henry. I would like to be his wife, to have a home with him, to make him supremely happy; we would forgive each other our little infatuations for others; we would work and read together, have informal bohemian but exquisite banquets...Work, work with that ecstasy in both of us which is great enough to shatter the world." [Diary Entry: February 18, 1933]
"Experience. Curiosity. Coldness. I don't know yet how to treat that whip. When Allendy tries a few preliminary lashes I'm simply angry and feel like hitting back. I don't see any "voluptuous" quality in it...Allendy laid me on the bed and whipped my buttocks hard. But I noticed this: His penis, after all this excitement on his part-- lashes, struggles, caresses of fury, kisses on the breasts-- was still soft. Henry would have been already blazing. Allendy pushed my head toward it, as the first time, and then, with all the halo of excitement, threats, he fucked no better than before."" [Diary Entry: April 19, 1933]
"I do not think of Artaud as a body. Of his body I know only his eyes. I like his leanness, his gestures. He looks like his thoughts...I do not want to be near his body. Why does he want this nearness? I lie to him about it. I have no desire for him.. I'm in love with his mind, with the most subtle of all intelligences, of all supernatural manifestations. I would like just to write him, not to be with him. He is the genie of abstractions. He rules over the abstract. There he holds me spellbound." [Diary Entry: June 22, 1933]
"Father asked me to move nearer..."Let me kiss your mouth." He put his arms around me. I hesitated. I was tortured by a complexity of feelings, wanting his mouth, yet afraid, feeling I was to kiss a brother, yet tempted-- terrified and desirous...We kissed, and that kiss unleashed a wave of desire...Another kiss. More terror than joy...He caressed my breasts and the tips hardened. I was resisting, saying no, but my nipples hardened. And when his hand caressed me-- oh, the knowingness of those caresses-- I melted. But all the while some part of me was hard and terrified. My body yielded to the penetration of his hand, but I resisted, I resisted enjoyment...I was timid and unwilling, yet passionately moved...With a strange violence, I lifted my negligee and I lay over him...Ecstatic, his face, and I now frenzied with desire to unite with him...undulating, caressing him, clinging to him. His spasm was tremendous, of his whole being. He emptied all of himself in me...and my yielding was immense, with my whole being, with only that core of fear which arrested the supreme spasm in me." [Diary Entries: July, 1933]
"Today [Rank] was not shy. He dragged me toward the divan and we kissed savagely, drunkenly. He looked almost beside himself, and I could not understand my own abandon. I had not imagined a sensual accord." [Diary Entry: June 1, 1934]
"I cannot live without seeing him. It is a hunger, an unbearable hunger. I rushed to him today. It is like touching fire. He makes me terribly happy." [Diary Entry: August 14, 1934]
