Quotes from Anais Nin

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

Instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse's, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle testing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into this mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation - indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert.

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

We are more severe judges of our own acts... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.

All I wanted was humor and wisdom.

This morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.

There is no bleaker moment in life of the city than that one which crosses the boundary lines between those who have not slept all night and those who are going to work. It was for Sabina as if two races of men and women lived on earth, the night people and the day people, never meeting face to face except at this moment.

I have seen romanticism outlast the realistic. I have seen men forget the beautiful women they have possessed, forget the prostitutes, and remember the first woman they idolized, the woman they could never have. The woman who aroused them romantically holds them.

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

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

I dreamed you, I wished for your existence.

I have raged at the wall growing between myself and others. I expect intuitive, miraculous understanding, or else I'm disillusioned and don't want to struggle to make things clear.

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!

Please understand I am in full rebellion against my own mind, that when I live, I live by impulse, by emotion, by white heat.

Pleasure is an attitude, not a person or place.   —Diary 6, pg. 52

We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.

The real wonders of life lie in the depths. Exploring the depths for truths is the real wonder which the child and the artist know: magic and power lie in truth.

I looked at it [revolver] as if it reminded me of a crime I had committed with an irrepressible smile such as rises sometimes to people's lips in the face of great catastrophes which are beyond their grasp, the smile that comes at times on certain women's faces while they are saying they regret the harm they have done. It is the smile of nature quietly and proudly asserting its natural right to kill.

We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in modern life. That is our tragedy. Once I wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only absolute act left to do, for what is most powerful in me is the craving for purity, greatness.

When I first met him, he did not care if a friend did not fit into his world, because at that time his world had not been born yet.

Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.

Every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room.

Will you come down and kiss me good night?

This is not to worry you, Henry, it is just that I can't keep from saying it, that I am overflowing, desperately in love with you as I never was with anyone.