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Anais Nin Quotes - Page 17

All Quotes Acceptance Adventure Age Anxiety Art Attitude Balance Betrayal Blindness Break Up Business Change Chaos Character Children Confidence Courage Creation Creativity Crime Culture Curiosity Death Desire Destiny Dying Earth Effort Evil Failing Falling In Love Fate Fear Feelings Freedom Friendship Giving Gold Guilt Happiness Hate Heart Heartbreak Hunger Hurt Imagination Individuality Innocence Inspirational Inspiring Jazz Journey Joy Judging Kissing Knowledge Language Laughter Letting Go Life Love Lying Madness Magic Making Love Marriage Memories Motivational Moving On Music Myth Pain Passion Past Perfection Personality Positivity Poverty Prejudice Progress Reality Reflection Risk Romanticism Silence Sisterhood Sleep Solitude Soul Strength Struggle Submission Suffering Tragedy Travel Truth Ugliness Understanding Violence Virtue Vision Waiting Wall War Weakness Wife Wine Worship Writing

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

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

Truth, Hypocrisy, Deception

"The Diary Of Anais Nin, Vol. 5 (1947-1955)". Book by Anais Nin, 1975.

The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.

Pain, Violence, Mystery

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

Fighting, Men, People

Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.

Self, Monsters, World

"House of Incest". Book by Anais Nin, 1936.

I looked at it [revolver] as if it reminded me of a crime I had committed with an irrepressible smile such as rises sometimes to people’s lips in the face of great catastrophes which are beyond their grasp, the smile that comes at times on certain women’s faces while they are saying they regret the harm they have done. It is the smile of nature quietly and proudly asserting its natural right to kill.

Regret, People, Done

I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly.

Leader, Want, Submission

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we ... believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

Courage, Believe, Innocent

I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.

Thinking, June, Genius

I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again. ANAÏS NIN, Fire: From "A Journal of Love" The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1938 For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration.

Stars, Adventure, Fire

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

Addiction, Drug, Vices

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.

Judging, People, Secret

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.

Eye, Men, Race

"House of Incest". Book by Anais Nin, 1936.

Instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse’s, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle testing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into this mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation - indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert.

Zoos, Wall, Eye

My trunk, valises and my mind are overpacked.

Mind, Trunks

His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that...only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it.

Angel, Devil, Rhythm

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.

Horse, Self, Track

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.

Fall, Glasses, Mirrors

To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard

Skins, Evolve, Feels

We sit on the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds.

Kitchen, Mind, Exchanging

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.

Self, Indulge In, People

Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents.

Artist, Flow, Currents

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!

Friendship, Keys, Wife

He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself. . . . For him the only danger came from the microbes that attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which eats into the soul.

Soul, Body, Danger

I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self.

Self, Voice, Long

To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school [of writing]. A hunger for the unknown and an aspiration toward beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial.

Art, Mistake, Mean

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