Top 519 Quotes & Sayings by Anais Nin - Page 7

The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium.

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.

The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.

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.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage "People living deeply have no fear of death.

..he made me understand something very important. Whether because I am a Latin, or because I am a neurotic, I have a need of gestures. I am myself expressive, demonstrative; every feeling I have takes on expression: words, gestures, signs, letters, articulateness or action. I need this in others.

She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self. The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost, she had walked into pure chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the galloping of romantic riders in operas and legends, but which suddenly revealed the stage props: a papier-mâché horse.

In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action.

notes fly so much farther than words. There is no other way to reach the infinite.

I have seen romanticism outlast the realistic. I have seen men forget the beautiful women they have possessed, forget the prostitutes, and remember the first woman they idolized, the woman they could never have. The woman who aroused them romantically holds them.

I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously.

To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.

In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.

This great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes air, or swallows a snowflake, or yields to the sun.

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

I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.

She makes use of the soft of the bread for a napkin. She falls asleep at times with shoes on, on unmade beds. When a little money comes in, June buys delicacies, strawberries in the winter, caviar and bath salts.

I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

The shell is America's most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early.

We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in modern life. That is our tragedy. Once I wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only absolute act left to do, for what is most powerful in me is the craving for purity, greatness.

One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.

How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between.

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.

I did not feel drawn to huxley. He was beautiful physically but again without vibrations or sensory antennae... and I had a painful impression of a psychic blindness. With all his science and knowledge, in the mystic world he blundered.

gold never comes to the dreamers - except in dreams.

New York seems conducted by jazz, animated by it. It is essentially a city of rhythm.

Will you come down and kiss me good night?

New York has an electronic heart.

We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.

Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to this poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, 'Climb!

I palliate the sufferings of others. yes I see myself as softening the blows, dissolving acids, neutralizing poisons, every moment of the day. I try to fulfill the wishes of others, to perform miracles. I exert myself performing miracles.

Either one fails in one's art or in one's life.

People who want a sane, static, measurable world take the first aspect of an event or person and stick to it, with an almost self-protective obstinacy, or by a natural limitation of their imaginations. They do not indulge in either deepening or magnifying.

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

I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream.

Nothing endures unless it has first been transposed into a myth, and the great advantage of myths is that they are ladies with portable roots.

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.

When I hear of people who weary of each other, I believe it is because they have sought virtues in themselves alone, attractions of physical beauty. Have they based their love on each other's thoughts? Who can weary of thoughts which change every day?

He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away.

Why do I doubt her? Perhaps she is just very sensitive, and hypersensitive people are false when others doubt them; they waver. And one thinks them insincere. Yet I want to believe her. At the same time it does not seem so very important that she should love me. It is not her role. I am so filled with my love of her. And at the same time I feel that I am dying. Our love would be death. The embrace of imaginings.

The failures are not due to any injustice, but to an inner defect. It is always caused by the person himself. Yes, I know, you think you are doing an act of justice. But they will only suck you dry, wear out your energy, nourish themselves on your ideas. After being the most compassionate man in the world, I say to you today: Let the weak ones die, let them commit suicide.

He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.

Anxiety is love's greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning.

They courted the face on the screen, the face of translucence, the face of wax on which men found it possible to imprint the image of their fantasy.

The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.

The same chemicals were used in the cooking as were used on the composition of her own being: only those which caused the most violent reaction, contradiction, and teasing, the refusal to answer questions but the love of putting them, and all the strong spices of human relationship which bore a relation to black pepper, paprika, soybean sauce, ketchup and red peppers.

A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.

Not afraid of poverty and drabness and who is untouched by it, untouched by the drunkenness of her friends; (she) who judges, selects, discards people with severity, who knows, when she is telling her endless anecdotes, that they are ways of escape, keeping herself all the more secret behind that profuse talk.

she acquired the certainty of the expansion of time by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity of experience.

Now that I am moving, I am afraid. Where am I going?

My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea and my eyes are the color of water.

Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.

My diary seems to keep me whole.

She was fully, painfully aware that very rarely did midnight strike in two hearts at once, very rarely did midnight arouse two different equal desires, and that any dislocation in this, any indifference, was an indication of disunity, of the difficulties, the impossibilities of fusion between two human beings.

To commit suicide is easy. To live without a god is more difficult. The drunkenness of triumph is greater than the drunkenness of sacrifice.

Secrets. Need to disguise. The novel was born of this.

The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.

He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity.

I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.