Quotes About Anais Nin

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.

There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.

Our age has need of violence, he writes. And he is violence.

Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.

Every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room.

And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity...

I would tell him how he almost made us lose interest in passion by his obsession with the gestures empty of their emotions, and how we reviled him, because he almost caused us to take vows of chastity, because what he wanted us to exclude was our own aphrodisiac—poetry.

Woman brings pain. Woman is evil. There are no exceptions. I tell you, even the angels are liars. What does Proust say? "We lie all our lives, and more especially, only perhaps, to those whom we love." Open your Proust. I have underlined it for you.

Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one...

Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions have given them? Give me your hat.

We are dancing on our irony as upon the top of glowing sparks.

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

Golconda remained a city where the wind was like velvet, where the sun was made of radium, and the sea as warm as a mother's womb.

Drink champagne! It's advertised in the Tribune as a "health" drink. Drink champagne while listening to Bach and Beethoven. It's a fine preventative.

But I also hate Nietzsche. I wish you would tell me something that would make me understand him. I began with Zarathustra—fatuous language, and the world full of "tougher and merrier" men!

Whatever tragic spirit lay behind this polished surface went into her singing, with which she tore people's serenity to shreds, spreading anxiety and regrets and nostalgia everywhere.

I don't like superior attitudes based on well-poised intellect. I hate well-poised intellects.

I thought of you again while reading The Brothers Karamazov (The Sensualists). Everything I read now has a different meaning, a terrible meaning; the way I read Dostoevsky anyway is not reading, it is actual passionate experience, as when I read you.

Just that divine understanding and unique responsiveness and clairvoyance, the match to my mind.

Description of yourself walking through Paris and the tips of your breasts taut and tingling. Feeling, as I read your book, that for the first time I was going to know what are a woman's sensations in love . . . Asking myself over and over, does she look at men always with those steady eyes? . . .

So many Anaïses you have shown me—and now this one—as if to prove your protean versatility.

I realized that for me it is only and always the "literary" appeal that people and places make. The reality is void of interest. Flat.

I think now that at the root of all my writing lies the fact that very early in life I lost the desire to participate with others on the basis laid down by society. All I have been doing, possibly, in my work, is to protest and explain wherein I'm different.