Quotes from Anais Nin

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life.

Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.

Laughter and tears are not separate experiences, with intervals of rest: they rush out together and it is like walking with a sword between your legs.

They smiled at each other. His smile, even at night was dazzling; hers, too. They could scarcely distinguish anything but the brilliant smiles and the outlines of their perfect bodies.

I gave away my mystery, knowing I shouldn't, yet incapable of anything else.

Man needs reality, and woman illusion. Man needs illusion, too, but the woman who gives him illusion also gives him less reality—in proportion.

Die Vergangenheit war wie jene altmodischen, mit Kräutern und Blumen gefüllten Duftkissen, deren Aroma die Kleider durchdringt und an ihnen haften bleibt.

I wanted to hear women with musical voices, women soft and undulating, women all women, slaves maybe, dupes too, but what matter . . . women.

No moment of charm without long roots in the past, no moment of charm is born on bare soil, a careless accident of beauty, but is the sum of great sorrows, growths, and efforts.

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

His theatre was the clouds, where no spectacle repeated itself. On land he was a foreigner. Land for him was stasis, and it pulled him into immobility, which was his image of death." —

Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods,no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

Only beware of your reason, your intelligence. Do not attempt to resolve. . . . Don't preach. No moral conclusions.

Once a month, the moonstorm. Dust in the eyes and ghosts in the veins. The blood of woman is spilling and all the strength ebbs away.

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality.

Ali Baba protects the lovers! Gives them the luck of bandits, and no guilt, for love fills certain people and expands them beyond all laws; there is no time, no place for regrets, hesitations, cowardices. Love runs free and reckless, and all the gentle trickeries perpetrated to protect others from its burns-those who are not the lovers but who might be the victims of this love's expansion.

I'll let you explain me to myself—that sounds intelligent and fantastic. Don't worry about offending me—that's quite impossible. .

Your beauty drowns me, drowns the core of me. When your beauty burns me I dissolve as I never dissolved before man. From all men I was different, and myself, but I see in you that part of me which is you. I feel you in me, I feel my own voice becoming heavier, as if I were drinking you in every delicate thread of resemblance being soldered by fire and one no longer detects the fissure.

Out of worship and out of love he would let no one light the stove for her either, as if he would be the warmth and the fire to dry and warm her feet.

am discovering her pretenses. She is always smiling, gay, but underneath she feels unreal, remote, detached from experience. She acts as if she were asleep. She is trying to awaken by falling into bed with anyone who invites her.

Confront all the angry thoughts, feelings, the jealousies and condemnations, to find their cause, seek the root of such feelings and then operate on that. Need of security and reassurance can cause criminal acts.

You know, Lillian, someday I will sit down and write a little dictionary for you, a little Chinese dictionary. In it I will put down all the interpretations of what is said to you, the right interpretation, that is: the one that is not meant to injure, not meant to humiliate or accuse or doubt. And whenever something is said to you, you will look in my little dictionary to make sure, before you get desperate, that you have understood what is said to you.

This is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me... I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe.

Now that I have been truthful I am no longer anxious. Anaïs