Quotes from Anais Nin

She would crush me to ashes without hesitation...She will add the sum of me to her. She will be June, plus all that I contain.

En el café advierto cenizas bajo la piel de su rostro. Desintegración. Siento una terrible ansiedad. Siento ganas de abrazarla. Noto cómo retrocede hacia la muerte y yo estoy dispuesta a acoger la muerte para seguirla, para abrazarla. Se muere ante mis ojos. Su belleza provocadora y sombría se apaga. Su extraña, masculina fuerza.

Perfection is static, and I am in full progress. The faithful wife is only one phase, one moment, one metamorphosis, one condition.

We need only to sharpen up the implements. I can see you giving birth to books in rapid succession. I believe in you enormously—I was genuinely stirred—also exasperated.

A identidade do casal humano não era eterna, mas permutável, para proteger essa troca de espíritos, transmissões de caráter, todas as fecundações de novos eus vindo à luz [...]

You don't know what sensuality is. Hugo and I do. It's in us, not in your devious practices; it's in feeling, in passion, in love.

Kay was showing this, exaggerating her whims- loving herself through Leila, really.

I look around my room to see what I can offer you; I see only my silly water colors and notes—notes everywhere, and on the backs your name—show this to Anaïs, ask Anaïs, see Anaïs.

What a powerful duet! What a mixture of significant irrelevancies, illuminating incongruities! [. . .]

I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women, to enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born

I kill one realistic dragon a day, and unfortunately the meat is too tough to eat or we could save money on steak.

I will never settle down, never have a home. My symbol is a roving ship. I am a writer. I would rather have been a courtesan. the rest is in the diary

I divined her life at that moment. She only believed in intimacy and proximity, in confessions born in the darkness of a bedroom, in quarrels born of alcohol, in communions born of exhausting walks through the city. She only believed in those words that came like the confessions of criminals after a long exposure to hunger, to intense lights, to cross-questioning, to violent tearing away of masks.

I remember your phrase: "Only whores appreciate me." I wanted to say: you can only have blood-consciousness with whores, there is too much mind between us, too much literature, too much illusion—but then you denied there had been only mind. . . .

Les Frontières Humaines[by Ribemont-Dessaigne] came and I looked at the jacket and I do not read it. It looks too good. I am saving it for a rainy day, a day of despair, when one wants to eat his fellow man. I love the looks of it. I believe in it before reading a page.

I saw a mouth that was at once intelligent, animal, and soft . . . strange mixture—a human man, sensitively aware of everything—I love awareness—a man, I told you, whom life made drunk.

There is a side to Henry that is criminal, identifies itself to the criminal. In Cancer there was a total absence of feeling. Today his absence of feeling for France is appalling, inhuman, after ten years of life there. Why? I have sometimes a feeling for even a particular tree in Paris, a sudden tender remembrance of a certain street. Henry nothing.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth.

Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously

How criminal to expect all life and joy from one human being.

Enter this laboratory of the soul where incidents are refracted into a diary, dissected to prove that every one of us carries a deforming mirror where he sees himself too small or too large, too fat or too thin… Once the deforming mirror is smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness; there is a possibility of joy. —Diary 1, pg. 105

I'm not going to let the book go for a song—and I'm not going to let Kahane get the idea that he's doing me a favor by publishing it.

El impulso de crecer y de vivir intensamente es tan imperioso en mí que me es imposible resistirme a él