Quotes from Anais Nin

I watched life and wanted to be a part of it but found it painfully difficult.

The most haunting woman is the one we cannot find in the crowded café when we are looking for her, the one that we must hunt for, and seek out through the disguises of her stories.

His entire body was pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could she give him to cure his doubt?

Perhaps I should not tell him the dream. It puts me in his hands, it is giving him too much

Now that I am moving, I am afraid. Where am I going?

He had never seen her body so abandoned, so unconscious of all but the desire to be taken and satisfied. She bloomed under his caresses, no longer the girl but the woman already being born.

Why do I doubt her? Perhaps she is just very sensitive, and hypersensitive people are false when others doubt them; they waver. And one thinks them insincere. Yet I want to believe her. At the same time it does not seem so very important that she should love me. It is not her role. I am so filled with my love of her. And at the same time I feel that I am dying. Our love would be death. The embrace of imaginings.

We efface an hour by passionate love, without twists, without aftertaste. When it is finished, it is not finished, we lie still in each other's arms lulled by our love, by tenderness -- sensuality in which the whole being can participate.

Her elongated eyes did not close as other women's eyes did, but like the eyes of tigers, pumas and leopards, the two lids meeting lazily and slowly; and they seemed slightly sewn together towards the nose, making them narrow, with a lascivious, oblique glance falling from them like the glance of a woman who does not want to see what is being done to her body. All this gave her an air of being made love to, which aroused the Baron as soon as he met her.

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

I feel very small. I don't understand. I have so much courage, fire, energy, for many things, yet I get so hurt, so wounded by small things.

I did not feel drawn to huxley. He was beautiful physically but again without vibrations or sensory antennae... and I had a painful impression of a psychic blindness. With all his science and knowledge, in the mystic world he blundered.

I can only connect deeply or not at all.

I would not be concerned with the secrets, the lies, the mysteries, the facts. I would be concerned with what makes them necessary. What fear.

So many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost object, a misplaced unread book, cluttering the room like an attic with discarded possessions.

I am apparently gentle, unstable, and full of pretenses. I will die a poet killed by the nonpoets, will renounce no dream, resign myself to no ugliness, accept nothing of the world but the one I made myself. I wrote, lived, loved like Don Quixote, and on the day of my death I will say: 'Excuse me, it was all a dream,' and by that time I may have found one who will say: 'Not at all, it was true, absolutely true.

A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.

The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence.

Yes, it is you, and I am in love with you and I am going to be frank with you, brutally frank, because when you have an equal you can afford to be frank.

But I am not sure what this self is. For the moment I seem to be busy tearing down what I was.

All of my creation is an effort to weave a web of connection with the world: I am always weaving it because it was once broken.

Hell is a different place for each man, or each man has his own particular hell. My descent into the inferno is a descent into the irrational level of existence, where the instincts and blind emotions are loose, where one lives by pure impulse, pure fantasy, and therefore pure madness. No, that is not the inferno.

If a person continues to see only giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child.

In you alone I have found the same swelling of enthusiasm, the same quick rising of the blood, the fullness… Before, I almost used to think there was something wrong. Everybody else seemed to have the brakes on… I never feel the brakes. I overflow. And when I feel your excitement about life flaring, next to mine, then it makes me dizzy.