Quotes from Anais Nin

A writer could completely baffle a psychologist." A writer and a woman, a woman with imagination, too, and a psychologist half blinded. Oh yea?

One goes to the magician, as one goes to the analyst, or any quack—to reaffirm one's own secret volitions. Not to be cured, not to be warned, not to be saved, but to become what one wants to be.

We carefully observe and watch the happenings of the entire world without realizing they are projections of our inner selves.

I take on the dullness of the landscape, the torpid heat of the day, the barren vista of rocks, the anonymous stream of humanity that sluices back and forth through city after city endlessly and ceaselessly. I am protean, to the point of disease.

But listen, I must finish Lawrence, Joyce & Proust. It's driving me nuts. I feel like a slacker. I'll spit them out alive, if necessary. I'm screwed up to a frenzy. Vino, vino . . . I wish I had the taste for it. Vino isn't strong enough. It's blood I want. Henry

We give to our friends only a small part of ourselves. In the climate of love another being emerges.

I am writing you constantly—in my head and the days pass and I wonder what you will think.

I never want to try and be a thinker again. I'm not a thinker. I'd really like to read what somebody else wrote about Lawrence, and, by God, hereafter I will.

But in life, we cannot always obtain from the lover a full image or revelation of what he sees in his loved one. It remains hidden from our eyes. Because love not only can detect a potential, aun unborn personality, a buried one, a disguised one, but also bring it into reality.

Entre pelea y pelea somos intensamente felices. Infierno y paraíso a un tiempo. Somos a la vez libres y esclavos. En ocasiones parecía que supiésemos que la única atadura que puede unirnos es el frenesí, idéntica intensidad que entre amantes y queridas.

I even take a little pleasure in tormenting Harry. I let him dream all month, and then again I exile him because he is disintegrated, chaotic, unbalanced, because he is sick, the nakedness of his appetite and greed revolt me. His audacity and demands.

You come and the time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize completely your presence. And then it is too late. You numb me.

Don't hesitate to betray your ignorance. It's no crime.

Hay dos modos de llegar a mí, mediante los besos o la imaginación. Pero existe una jerarquía; los besos por sí solos no bastan.

You ought to write my books. How can anybody do anything in three weeks? To do that one must be a god. God took a week to create the world. I take my hat off to him too. It's stupendous. Unbelievable. Let it stay that way.

Every room is painted a different color. As if there were one room for every separate mood: lacquer red for vehemence, pale turquoise for reveries, peach color for gentleness, green for repose, grey for work at the typewriter.

What is necessary to life, to livingness, is to move on, in other words to move from one kind of problem to another. Jung has mentioned this. The neurotic is obsessed with one kind of problem. He cannot move on.

I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again

What I detest about these books of maxims is that they are so platitudinously true. A la Molière, Aesop, La Rochefoucauld—Shakespeare. They apply to all women, and that must include you too. But somehow it doesn't ring true to me. But it's disquieting.

Comienzo a ver las cosas con mayor claridad. Ahora sé por qué el primer día no me fiaba de él. Sus acciones se hallan desprovistas de sentimiento y de imaginación. Motivadas por meros hábitos de vida, de aprehensión y de análisis. Es un saltamontes. Ahora ha saltado a mi vida. Mi sensación de repugnancia se intensifica.

What you said the other day about the futility of running away was very profound; and very courageous. Listen, Henry, I believe you should talk with Jung. I

Jesus, don't think this is cold. I'm just simply functioning as mind. The whole thing is going to collapse soon—the mind, I mean.

In the last ten days they sold only 9 books, 6 of which were mine. It is trickling along, Eve Adams* still selling a few now and then. Much réclame in Montparnasse. Have to keep away from [Café] Dôme and other places because I am constantly being introduced to jackasses who read the book and whom I don't care to know. [. . .]

Mighty dissonances, in the superhuman effort to dissolve the plexus of the medium.