ANAÏS NIN

The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.

ANAÏS NIN

___________________

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

ANAÏS NIN

____________________

I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning, and moulding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.

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
A Spy in the House of Love

____________________

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
A Spy in the House of Love

____________________

The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.

A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE

____________________

Anaïs Nin

ANAÏS NIN
A Spy in the House of Love

____________________

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

"Risk"

____________________

And then the day came,

when the risk

to remain tight

in a bud

was more painful

than the risk

it took

to Blossom.

ANAÏS NIN

____________________

I knew I could not separate myself from the world’s death, even though I was not one of those who brought it about. I had to make clear the relation of our individual dramas to the larger one, and our responsibility. I was never one with the world, yet I was to be destroyed with it. I always lived seeing beyond it. I was not in harmony with its explosions and collapse. I had, as an artist, another rhythm, another death, another renewal. 

That was it. I was not at one with the world, I was seeking to create one by other rules. And therefore how could I die in tune with it? I could only die in my own time, by my own evolutions. I did not belong to any epoch, for I had made my home in man’s most active cells, the cells of his dreams. Through love, compassion, desire, you get entangled and confused. But the artist is not there to be at one with the world, she is there to transform it. (S)he cannot belong to it, for then (s)he would not achieve his/her task, which is to change. The struggle against destruction which I lived out in my intimate relationships had to be transposed and become of use to the whole world.

ANAÏS NIN

Henry and June: A Journal of Love

The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931–1932)

____________________

The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.

ANAÏS NIN
The Early Diaries, Vol 2 (1920-1923)

I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.

ANAÏS NIN

The Diaries of Anaïs Nin, Vol 2 (1934-1939)

Man today is like a tree that is withering at the roots. And most women painted and wrote nothing but imitations of phalluses. The world was filled with phalluses, like totem poles, and no womb anywhere. 

I must go the opposite way from Proust who found eternal moments in creation. I must find them in life. My work must be the closest to the life flow. I must install myself inside of the seed, growth, mysteries. I must prove the possibility of instantaneous, immediate, spontaneous art. My art must be like a miracle. Before it goes through the conduits of the brain and becomes an abstraction, a fiction, a lie. 

It must be for woman, more like a personified ancient ritual, where every spiritual thought was made visible, enacted, represented.

ANAÏS NIN

Delta of Venus

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
Little Birds

____________________

With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness. Something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame, annihilate him, with a pleasure never known before.

ANAÏS NIN

The Diaries, Volume 1 (1931-1934)

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
Little Birds

____________________

He was whispering over and over again the same phrase, “You have the body of an angel. It is impossible that such a body should have a sex. You have the body of an angel.” 

The anger swept over Fay like a fever, an anger at his moving his penis away from her hand. She sat up, her hair wild about her shoulders, and said, “I am not an angel, Albert. I am a woman. I want you to love me as a woman.

ANAÏS NIN
Little Birds

There are women’s voices that sound like poetic, unearthly echoes. Then they change. The eyes change. I believe that all these legends about people changing into animals at night – like the stories of the werewolf, for instance – were invented by men who saw women transformed at night – from idealized, worshipful creatures into animals and thought that they were possessed.

ANAÏS NIN

Little Birds

____________________

We don't see people as they are. We see people as we are.

ANAÏS NIN

It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.