Quotes by Anaïs Nin

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Im restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

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.

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.

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.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then dont write, because our culture has no use for it.

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.

The other night we talked about literatures elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated dose of life. I said, almost indignantly, Thats 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.

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 writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collectors 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.

Henrys 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. Henrys 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 Freuds Preface to a Little Girls Journal.

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

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 youre not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasnt 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.

When youre in my arms, I know youre 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.

Love the great narcotic was the revealer in the alchemists bottle rendering visible the most untraceable substances. Love the great narcotic was the agent provocateur exposing all the secret selves to daylight.