Anais Nin

Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me. I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

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

She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness...A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there.

Each friend represents a world in us.

There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.

The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.

A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.

When you possess light within, you see it externally.

Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

But the artist persists because he has the will to create, and this is the magic power which can transform and transfigure and transpose and which will ultimately be transmitted to others.

Often, though, the passivity of the woman's role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? It terrifies me. Do women act thus? Does June go to Henry when she wants him? Does she mount him? Does she wait for him? He guides my inexperienced hands. It is like a forest fire, to be with him. New places of my body are aroused and burnt. He is incendiary. I leave him in an unquenchable fever.

Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate. I hate murderously.

Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.

The child in me could not die as it should have died, because according too legends it must find its father again. The old legends knew, perhaps, that in absence the father becomes glorified, deified, eroticized, and this outrage against God the Father has to be atoned for. The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.

I cheat him, I deceive him, yet the world does not sink in sulphur-colored mists. Madness conquers. I can no longer put my mosaics together. I just cry and laugh.

The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery. Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.

Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.

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.

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.