Quotes by Diaries Writers - Page 4

His entire body was pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could she give him to cure his doubt?
Anaïs Nin
No man and woman know what will be born in the darkness of their intermingling; so much besides children, so many invisible births, exchanges of soul and character, blossoming of unknown selves, liberation of hidden treasures, buried fantasies...
Anaïs Nin
The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence.
Anaïs Nin
You are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.
Anaïs Nin
In this instant of danger they realized they were each other's reason for living, and into this instant they threw their whole being.
Anaïs Nin
So many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost object, a misplaced unread book, cluttering the room like an attic with discarded possessions.
Anaïs Nin
Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.
Anaïs Nin
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...
Anaïs Nin
When you're in my arms, I know you're mine. But your feet are so swift, so swift, they carry you as lightly as wings, I never know where, too fast, too fast away from me.
Anaïs Nin
Love the great narcotic was the revealer in the alchemist's bottle rendering visible the most untraceable substances. Love the great narcotic was the agent provocateur exposing all the secret selves to daylight.
Anaïs Nin
You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.
Anaïs Nin
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
Anaïs Nin
Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.
Anaïs Nin
Henry's recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while walking the streets, traveling to see a friend; and life does not stop while he remembers. Analysis in movement. No static vivisection. Henry's daily and continuous flow of life, his sexual activity, his talks with everyone, his cafe life, his conversations with people in the street, which I once considered an interruption to writing, I now believe to be a quality which distinguishes him from other writers. He never writes in cold blood: he is always writing in white heat.It is what I do with the journal, carrying it everywhere, writing on cafe tables while waiting for a friend, on the train, on the bus, in waiting rooms at the station, while my hair is washed, at the Sorbonne when the lectures get tedious, on journeys, trips, almost while people are talking.It is while cooking, gardening, walking, or love-making that I remember my childhood, and not while reading Freud's 'Preface to a Little Girl's Journal.
Anaïs Nin
The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.
Anaïs Nin
A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.
Anaïs Nin
The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments. You, in your books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with excitement that I expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated."Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying to live up to Dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm.
Anaïs Nin
I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.
Anaïs Nin
I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.
Anaïs Nin
This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.
Anaïs Nin
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
Anaïs Nin
The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.
Anaïs Nin
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
Anaïs Nin
The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable, which is the lost faith.
Anaïs Nin
At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness.
Anaïs Nin
A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.
Anaïs Nin
I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.
Anaïs Nin
People living deeply have no fear of death.
Anaïs Nin
But my faith seems naive, at least today. Maybe tomorrow I can believe again.
Anaïs Nin
There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.
Anaïs Nin
He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.
Anaïs Nin
What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.
Anaïs Nin
One discovers that destiny can be diverted, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. Once the deforming mirror has been smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness. There is a possibility of joy.
Anaïs Nin
We are more severe judges of our own acts... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.
Anaïs Nin
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Anaïs Nin
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
Anaïs Nin
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.
Anaïs Nin
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle.
Anaïs Nin
Living never wore one so much as the effort not to live.
Anaïs Nin
life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat.
Anaïs Nin
She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.
Anaïs Nin
I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
Anaïs Nin
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
Anaïs Nin
We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.
Anaïs Nin
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
Anaïs Nin
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
Anaïs Nin
There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work.
Anaïs Nin
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
Anaïs Nin
Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
Anaïs Nin
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
Anaïs Nin
All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.
Anaïs Nin
Dreams are necessary to life.
Anaïs Nin
I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits
Anaïs Nin
Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
Anaïs Nin
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
Anaïs Nin
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Anaïs Nin
I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.
Anaïs Nin
And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.
Anaïs Nin
I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.
Anaïs Nin
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
Anaïs Nin