Anaïs Nin Quotes

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 child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.

Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky

"I told her, "We have both lost ourselves, but sometimes we reveal the most when we are least like ourselves. I am not trying to think any more. I can't think when I am with you. You are like me, wishing for a perfect moment, but nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a worldly way. Neither one of us can say just the right thing. We are overwhelmed. Let us be overwhelmed. It is so lovely, so lovely. I love you June.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

"Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.

She makes use of the soft of the bread for a napkin. She falls asleep at times with shoes on, on unmade beds. When a little money comes in, June buys delicacies, strawberries in the winter, caviar and bath salts.

"If I fall asleep, it is because I am overloaded. I sleep because one hour with Henry contains five years of my life, and one phrase, one caress answers the expectations of a hundred nights. When I hear him laugh, I say, "I have heard Rabelais.". And I swallow his laughter like bread and wine."

I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me.

There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work.

I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.

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

In my childhood diary I wrote: “I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much.

Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.

There will never be darkness because in both of us there's always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection has been a still experience...

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.