Anaïs Nin Quotes

page 4

“Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.”

“I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams.”

“Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.”

“The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have… excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.”

“The two men who have done the greatest harm to the world are Christ and Columbus. Christ taught us guilt and sacrifice, to live only in the other world, and Columbus discovered America and materialism.”

“I palliate the sufferings of others. yes I see myself as softening the blows, dissolving acids, neutralizing poisons, every moment of the day. I try to fulfill the wishes of others, to perform miracles. I exert myself performing miracles.”

“Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.”

“My first vision of earth was water veiled.”

“Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.”

“My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.”

“She makes use of the soft of the bread for a napkin. She falls asleep at times with shoes on, on unmade beds. When a little money comes in, June buys delicacies, strawberries in the winter, caviar and bath salts.”

“He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity.”

“she acquired the certainty of the expansion of time by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity of experience.”

“A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.”

“At first she beckoned and lured one into her world; then, she blurred the passageways, confused all the images, as if to elude detection.”

“A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.”

“There 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.”

“Secrets. Need to disguise. The novel was born of this.”

“Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives.”

“At night too, she puzzled the mystery of her desperate need of kindness. As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a lover, or for wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently: let him be kind.”

“I 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.”

“If happiness is the absence of fever then I will never know happiness. For I am posessed by a fever for knowledge, experience and creation.”

“I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.”

“I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.”

“There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned”

“He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away.”

“You are the poet, you walk inside my dreams…”

“You live out the confusions until they become clear.”

“The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.”

“Your eyes make me shy”

“words carry colors and sounds into the flesh”

“Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky”

“I can’t let you go now. I want to go places with you; obscure little places, just to be able to say: here I came with her.”

“Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.”

“I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have shared my kingdom with you.”

“Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death”

“We sit on the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds.”

“There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.”

“Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.”

“I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife.”

“They courted the face on the screen, the face of translucence, the face of wax on which men found it possible to imprint the image of their fantasy.”

“The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams.”

“How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities?… I never feel the four walls around the substance of the self, the core. I feel only space. Illimitable space.”

“Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go.”

“We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.”

“Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to this poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, 'Climb!”

“It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it.”

“I sleep with my feet on moss carpets, my branches in the cotton of the clouds.”

“The necessity for fiction was probably born of the problem of taboo on certain revelations. It was not only a need of the imagination but an answer to the limitations placed on portrayal of others.”