Quotes by Diaries Writers - Page 3

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again. What was she seeking to salvage from the daily current of living, what sudden revulsions drove her back into the solitary cell of the dream?
Anaïs Nin
Fucking is an art. The mere fact of introducing the cock in the cunt and moving it in and out until the ejaculation of spunk is not art. True, it is fucking, but the difference between that way of doing it and the way it should be done, is like the difference between a child's first drawing and a picture by the world's greatest painter.
Anaïs Nin
Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
Anaïs Nin
The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.
Anaïs Nin
I never lose sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled.
Anaïs Nin
Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.
Anaïs Nin
The truth is that this is the only way I can live: in two directions. I need two lives. I am two beings. When I return to Hugo in the evening, to the peace and warmth of the house, I return with deep contentment, as if this was the only condition for me. I bring home to Hugo a whole woman, freed of all 'possessed' fevers, cured of the poison of restlessness and curiosity which used to threaten our marriage, cured through action. Our love lives, because I live. I sustain and feed it. I am loyal to it, in my own way, which cannot be his way. If he ever reads these lines, he must believe me. I am writing calmly, lucidly while waiting for him to come home, as one waits for the chosen lover, the eternal one.
Anaïs Nin
We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.
Anaïs Nin
I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all. . .
Anaïs Nin
life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat.
Anaïs Nin
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
I am not always just living, just following all my fantasies; I come up for air, for understanding.
Anaïs Nin
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
Anaïs Nin
When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.
Anaïs Nin
We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.
Anaïs Nin
I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essentially human, not intellectual. I do not understand abstract act. Only art born of love, passion, pain.
Anaïs Nin
No one was ever born without that light or flame of life. Some event, some person stifles or drowns it altogether. I was always tempted to resuscitate such men by my own joyousness or luminosity.When I break glasses in a night club, as the Russians do, when my unconscious breaks out in wild rebellions, it is against life which has crippled these idealistic, romantic men. I respect these men, cold, pure, faithful, devoted, moral, delicate, sensitive, and unequal to life, more than I respect the tough-minded ones who return three blows to one received, who kill those who hurt them.
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
I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself because it always changes me.
Anaïs Nin
Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.
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
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
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...
Anaïs Nin
Beware of allowing a tactless word rebuttal a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.
Anaïs Nin
When one is pretending the entire body revolts.
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
Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body’s breath, and the strings’ wails and moans are echoes of the body’s music. It is the body’s vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.
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
I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.
Anaïs Nin
I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.
Anaïs Nin
When you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive
Anaïs Nin
Ali Baba protects the lovers! Gives them the luck of bandits, and no guilt, for love fills certain people and expands them beyond all laws; there is no time, no place for regrets, hesitations, cowardices. Love runs free and reckless, and all the gentle trickeries perpetrated to protect others from its burns-those who are not the lovers but who might be the victims of this love's expansion.
Anaïs Nin
There were always in me two women at least one woman desperate and bewildered who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene as upon a stage conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses helplessness despair and present to the world only a smile an eagerness curiosity enthusiasm interest.
Anaïs Nin
The relief of opening one's hand and letting go was immense. But soon after, I tightened again. A desire for revenge, a strange revenge.
Anaïs Nin
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.
Anaïs Nin
These rituals Rango could not sustain, for he could not maintain the effort to arrive on time since his lifelong habit had created the opposite habit: to elude, to avoid, to disappoint every expectation of others, every commitment, every promise, every crystallization.
Anaïs Nin
It is right that you should read according to your temperament, occupations, hobbies, and vocations. But it is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar, unwilling to explore the unfamiliar. In science, we respect the research worker. In literature, we should not always read the books blessed by the majority.
Anaïs Nin
The origin of illness may be in the past, but the virulent crisis must be dynamically tackled. I believe in attacking the core of the illness, through its present symptoms, quickly, directly. The past is a labyrinth. One does not have to step into it and move step by step through every turn and twist. The past reveals itself instantly, in today’s fever or abscess of the soul.
Anaïs Nin
Do you have regrets that we were so overwhelmed? Do you ever wish to live those hours over again and differently, with more confidence.
Anaïs Nin
Perhaps behind our occasional hostility toward the artist and writer there may be a slight tinge of jealousy. The man or woman who for the sake of family life, children, takes up work he does not like, disciplines himself, sacrifices some fantasy he had once, to travel or to paint, or even possibly to write, may feel toward the artist and writer a jealousy of his adventurous life. The artist and the writer have generally paid the full price for their independence and for the privilege of doing work they love, or for their artistic rebellions against standardized living or values.
Anaïs Nin
We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.
Anaïs Nin
We ought to be much more fearful of what we don’t know. We should really be fearful of an unconscious that inhabits us, that guides us, that influences our life and of which we don’t know the face and don’t know the message. Actually I have much less fear since I confronted fears. What’s frightening to me is people whose unconscious leads them, destroys them, and yet they will never stop and look at it. That’s the minotaur in the labyrinth, which many people never come face to face with. There was a very remarkable percussion composer, Edgar Varese, who always mocked psychology, mocked psychoanalysis, mocked psychiatry. He was satirical about it, wouldn’t have any of it. And yet his whole life pattern was self-destructive. He was an innovator and a tremendous musician. But he blocked himself. His biography is out now, and you can see the pattern. You can see this demon that was driving him, the origin of it. He seemed to be a very fearless, strong, tremendous tempered man with great force; he even looked like a Corsican bandit. But he had no power over the forces that were pushing him. That is what frightens me.
Anaïs Nin
Her presence had awakened in him a man suddenly whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in action.
Anaïs Nin
I put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all.
Anaïs Nin
Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
Anaïs Nin
Am I creating my own isolation? It seems to me that most of my acts are acts of integrity. So much takes place within me each day that by comparison I find a paucity, a stinginess, a silence in people which drives me to excess.
Anaïs Nin
I loved your breaking down that door, repeated Djuna. Through Rango she had breathed some other realm she had never attained before. She had touched through his act some climate of violence she had never known before.
Anaïs Nin
Then I realized the vital necessity of art. Human life, yes, you nurse people, you clean house, you market, but then comes the moment of solace and flight. i sit and write and summon other friends, other forms of life, other experiences, and the voyage and the exploration, the delving into character, the vast expanse of life's possibilities and potentialities, contemplation of future travels, of dazzling friendships, all this then makes the chores and the sacrifices beautiful because they are diverted toward some beautiful aim, they become part of the structure of a work of art.
Anaïs Nin
What is the greatest need of human beings? What is it they seek from me always? Intimacy. I listen with all my being, I am completely interested. I seek momentarily a full communion of eyes, feelings, thoughts.
Anaïs Nin
Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. But I am more preoccupied with loving.
Anaïs Nin
For our anxiety is the one thing we cannot place on the shoulders of others, it suffocates them.
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
Men can be in love with literary figures, with poetic and mythological figures, but let them meet with Artemis, with Venus, with any of the goddesses of love, and then they start hurling moral judgments.
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
Paul, Paul, this is the claim you never made, the fervor you never showed. You were so cool and light, so elusive, and I never felt you encircling me and claiming possession. Rango is saying all the words I wanted to hear you say. You never came close to me, even while taking me. You took me as men take foreign women in distant countries whose language they cannot speak. You took me in silence and strangeness.
Anaïs Nin
I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.
Anaïs Nin
June, you have killed my sincerity too. I will never again know who I am, what I am, what I love, what I want. Your beauty has drowned me, the core of me. You carry away with you a part of me reflected in you. When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You are the woman I want to be. I see in you that part of me which is you. I feel compassion for your childish pride, for your trembling unsureness, your dramatization of events, your enhancing of the loves given to you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madness.
Anaïs Nin
I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life.
Anaïs Nin
She abandoned herself to his whim, thinking it was to be an orgy of eyes and hands only.
Anaïs Nin
Men from the mountains always dream of the sea, and above all things I love to travel.
Anaïs Nin