Quotes by Anaïs Nin

Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress , my hairdresser, my make-up, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.

I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesnt impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me.

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.

One does not learn to suffer less but to dodge pain.

Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying You gave me the wrong key!

What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.

Before, as soon as I came home from all sorts of places I would sit down and write in my journal. Now I want to write you, talk with you... I love when you say all that happens is good, it is good. I say all that happens is wonderful. For me it is all symphonic, and I am so aroused by living - god, Henry, in you alone I have found the same swelling of enthusiasm, the same quick rising of the blood, the fullness... Before, I almost used to think there was something wrong. Everybody else seemed to have the brakes on... I never feel the brakes. I overflow. And when I feel your excitement about life flaring, next to mine, then it makes me dizzy.

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

Down the rusty bars of ladders to the undergrounds of the night propitious to the first man and woman at the beginning of the world. where there were no words by which to possess each other, no music for serenades, no presents to court with, no tournaments to impress and force a yielding, no secondary instruments, no adornments, necklaces, crowns to subdue, but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous, impaling of a woman on a man´s sensual mast

I am made only for passion; it is the temperature of love that I cannot endure. I am afraid, and I think it is death- everything but passion seems like death to me. Only in fever do I feel life.

They clutch and cling and howl when I leave them, but how badly they love.

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.

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a childs blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality.

I had a feeling that Pandoras box contained the mysteries of womans sensuality, so different from a mans and for which mans language was so inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored.

Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods,no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.

He had never seen her body so abandoned, so unconscious of all but the desire to be taken and satisfied. She bloomed under his caresses, no longer the girl but the woman already being born.