Anaïs Nin: Trending quotes

The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5, as quoted in Moving to Antarctica : An Anthology of Women's Writing (1975) by Margaret Kaminski
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Context: The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.

March 6, 1936 Fire
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Summer 1966, in The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume 7 (1966-1974)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Context: At a lecture I am asked to pronounce my name three times. I try to be slow and emphatic, "Anaïs — Anaïs — Anaïs. You just say "Anna" and then add "ees," with the accent on the "ees."

As quoted in French Writers of the Past (2000) by Carol A. Dingle, p. 126
Context: The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.

May 30, 1934
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Context: Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.

As quoted in Woman As Writer (1978) by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, p. 42
Context: The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.

Collages (1964), p. 116
Context: 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.

Winter, 1931-1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Context: Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

As quoted in D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers (1996) by Leo Hamalian, p. 93

The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Source: Delta of Venus

Source: Delta of Venus

July 7, 1934
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Variant: Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
Source: Incest: From a Journal of Love
Context: I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934