Anais Nin

You live out the confusions until they become clear.

The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.

Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions have given them? Give me your hat.

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

The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams.

We efface an hour by passionate love, without twists, without aftertaste. When it is finished, it is not finished, we lie still in each other's arms lulled by our love, by tenderness -- sensuality in which the whole being can participate.

Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.

At first she beckoned and lured one into her world; then, she blurred the passageways, confused all the images, as if to elude detection.

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.

Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue — that I had to do the job myself.

At sixteen, Sabina took moon baths, first of all, because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous.

We do not see the world as it is. We see the word as we are.

I sleep with my feet on moss carpets, my branches in the cotton of the clouds.

I love your silences, they are like mine.

... and the very folds of the curtains contained secrets and sighs.

We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.

Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me - the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

I am quite wiling to confide entirely in human being, except that at some moment or another human beings get preoccupied, moody, busy, inattentive, and there come an end to the interest, and this never happens in a journal!

When I am most deeply rooted, I feel the wildest desire to uproot myself.

I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.