To fight a real sorrow, a real loss, a real insult, a real disillusion, a real treachery was infinitely less difficult than to spend a night without sleep struggling with ghosts. The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts.
Quotations by:
Nin, Anais
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
(Attributed)
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
(Attributed)
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
(Attributed)
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
(Attributed)
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.
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
The Novel of the Future, ch. 2 “Abstraction” (1968)
(Source)
Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.
The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.
People living deeply have no fear of death.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1941-06)
(Source)
In her Diaries [ed. Stuhlmann (1969)].
Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge.
Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
