Quotes from Anais Nin

But that is poetry, I protest. Poetry is an abstraction.

The precondition, then, of the creative personality is not only acceptance, but its actual glorification of itself.

She would have liked to be like him, near to everyone, anyone, but she could not. It saddened her.

Explanations are for husbands, for people you don't care about any more.

Cannot or will not accept himself. How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities?

What interests me is not the core but the potentialities of this core to multiply and expand infinitely. The diffusion of the core, its suppleness and elasticity, rebound, ramifications. Spanning, encompassing, space-devouring, star-trodden journeys, everything around and between the core.

With the use of drugs people became passive, uncreative tourists in the world of images.

Everybody who keeps cool is superior. But who likes the man who keeps cool? Not I. If you go on like this I will fight!

Djuna, you're taking me to the bottom of the sea to live, like a real mermaid. I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. But you, poor Rango, you're from the mountain, water is not your element. You won't be happy. Men from the mountains always dream of the sea, and above all things I love to travel. Where are we sailing now? - Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart

It is after all only the intensity of feeling which makes Lady Chatterley superior to any French book on the same subject (even Lucienne by Jules Romain) and to this statement I will stick until I die.

The day we cease to take nourishment from the underground rivers of the psyche, we feel life is empty. We only become aware of alienation when neurosis sets in as the symptom of its existence.

It seemed to her that he was ready to live and die for emotional errors as women did, but that men he did not call them emotional errors; he called them history, philosophy, metaphysics....

Spengler tells how the Greeks never knew introspection [. . .]. He designates this as a Faustian malady. He is too fond of the Faustian soul, Spengler, did you notice? But how magnificently he writes about de Vinci, the painter I love best.

It is too bad we could not have gone to Spain. There I am sure it would have been grand—even Barcelona. But these imitation Parises are frightful. Morbid. It makes one realize that 9/10 of humanity is moronic—just beast and plant. If the earth is theirs, then let them have it.

In between our quarrels we are acutely happy. Hell and heaven all at once. We are at once free and enslaved.

as I have the tragic sense of life these days

What corrodes a love are the secrets.

Reading Albertine Disparue

Oh, Henry, I can't bear to be writing you—I want you desperately, I want to open my legs so wide, I'm melting and palpitating. I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them. Hugo is calling. I'll answer the rest of the letter tonight.

For the writer the conscious mind may be the great inhibitor, the great censor. This conscious mind is created by social mores, education, environment, family pressures, and conventions. For creativity it is necessary to work with the unconscious which accumulates pure experience, reactions, impressions, intuitions, images, memories—an unconscious freed from the negative effect of societal evaluations. The conscious mind can only act later as critic, selector, discarder.

He had overslept. Tomorrow. Mañana Djuna had forgotten this Latin deity: Mañana

But Allendy says the need of gestures, of proofs of friendship, love, devotion, comes from lack of confidence. I should not need them, I should be able to dispense with them. Proofs of love and friendship are that I give to others all the time. And everyone seems to need them.

On what wings does she take flight from Henry? As if the sensual act had been but a mouth applied to an opium pipe.

Frailty. Sweet, treacherous acquiescence. Bird docility. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old.