Quotes from Anais Nin

No woman has ever granted me all the privileges I need—and you, why you sing out so blithely, so boldly, with a laugh even—yes, you invite me to go ahead, be myself, venture anything. I adore you for that. That is where you are truly regal, a woman extraordinary.

He was whispering over and over again the same phrase, "You have the body of an angel. It is impossible that such a body should have a sex. You have the body of an angel." The anger swept over Fay like a fever, an anger at his moving his penis away from her hand. She sat up, her hair wild about her shoulders, and said, "I am not an angel, Albert. I am a woman. I want you to love me as a woman.

What you call your lies are fiction and myths. The art of creating a disguise can be as beautiful as the creation of a painting… I created a woman for my artist life, bold, gay, courageous, generous, fearless; and another to please my father, a clear-sighted woman with a love of beauty, harmony, and self-discipline, critical and selective; and still another who lives in chaos, embraces the weak and the stumbling and the confused.

Am I creating my own isolation? It seems to me that most of my acts are acts of integrity. So much takes place within me each day that by comparison I find a paucity, a stinginess, a silence in people which drives me to excess.

Her presence had awakened in him a man suddenly whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in action.

She wanted to be where she could not see herself. She wanted to be where everything did not happen twice. She walked, following the deep caverns of diminishing light. She touched ice and was bruised. To watch she must pause, and so what she caught was never the truth - the woman panting, dancing, weeping - it was only the woman who paused. The mirror was always one breath too late to catch the breathing.

Whereas by desiring someone who would not desire her, she could allow this fire to burn and feel: how alive I am! I am capable of desire.

Will I really be able to accept my mental loneliness?

I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her.

The words we did not shout, the tears unshed, the curse we swallowed, the phrase we shortened, the love we killed, turned into magnetic iron ore, into tourmaline, into pyrite agate, blood congealed into cinnabar, blood calcinated, leadened into galena, oxidized, aluminized, sulphated, calcinated, the mineral glow of dead meteors and exhausted suns in the forest of dead trees and dead desires.

You cannot do any more for me, I said. Since I have begun to depend on you I feel weaker than ever before. I have disappointed you by acting neurotically at the very moment when I should have shown the wisdom of your guidance. I don't want to ever come back to you. I feel that I must go and work and live and forget about all this.

She is suspicious of words. She lives by her senses, by her intuition. We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds. How are you going to tell about them?

Your strength is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same.

saw him as a saint. His attitude silenced me. From that moment on, if he had been brought back to me dead on a stretcher, I would not have cared. He cannot hurt me any more.

No moment of charm is born on bare soil, a careless accident of beauty, but is the sum of great sorrows, growths, and efforts.

Hugo has been infinitely tender with me, but while he talks of June I think of our hands locked together. She does not reach the same sexual center of my being that man reaches; she does not touch that. What, then, has she moved in me? I have wanted to possess her as if I were a man, but I have also wanted her to love me with the eyes, the hands, the senses that only women have. It is a soft and subtle penetration.

They clutch and cling and howl when I leave them, but how badly they love.

The unknown is my compass

You are a real hermaphrodite, Mafouka,' I said. 'That is what our age is supposed to have produced because the tension between the masculine and the feminine has broken down, people are mostly half of one and half of the other. But I have never seen it before—actually, physically. It must make you very unhappy.

To capture the drama of the unconscious, one had to start with the key, and the key was the dream. But the novelist's task was to pursue this dream, to unravel its meaning; the goal was to reach the relation of dream to life; the suspense was in finding this which led to a deeper significance of our acts.

Archaeologists of the soul never return empty-handed.

I am eleven years old, I know, and I am not serious enough. Last night I said to myself: tomorrow I will be good. Good? I wasn't any better than I was the day before. Now here is a new month, and I haven't yet thought out how to be more sensible, how to master my impulses and my temper. I am ashamed to be so undisciplined.

Why does a gesture, a walk, stir your blood? What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no drug and no alcohol to equal it.

You have broken down all formal order, grooves, more than anyone I know outside of Dostoevsky's books.