Anaïs Nin - The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1966)

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I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.

Anaïs Nin
We must protect the minority writers because they are the research workers of literature. They keep it alive. It has been fashionable of late to seek out and force such writers into more popular channels, to the detriment of both writer and an unprepared public.

Anaïs Nin
A city never entirely known, yet which gives you the feeling of intimacy, of possessing it intimately.

Anaïs Nin
The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.

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

Anaïs Nin
For all of my patients sensuality is a giving in to 'the low side of their nature.' Puritanism is powerful and distorts their life with a total anesthesia of the senses. If you atrophy one sense, you also atrophy all the others, a sensuous and physical connection with nature, with art, with food, with other human beings.

Anaïs Nin
Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge.

Anaïs Nin
What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no drug and no alcohol to equal it.

Anaïs Nin
Asia discovered two remedies for the cruelty of man, art and religion. America discarded both and is drowning in hate and aggressivity.

Anaïs Nin
When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.

Anaïs Nin
Self-destructive patterns cause as much suffering as outer catastrophes.

Anaïs Nin
Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy.

Anaïs Nin
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

Anaïs Nin
One always, sooner or later, comes upon a city which is an image of one's inner cities. Fez is an image of my inner self.... The layers of the city of Fez are like the layers and secrecies of the inner life. One needs a guide.... There were in Fez, as in my life, streets which led nowhere, impasses which remained a mystery.

Anaïs Nin
I loved an image of him which did not exist. When he is away, this image begins to obsess me. It invades me, and I begin to believe in it again. It is destroyed each time I see him.

Anaïs Nin
When I cannot bear outer pressures any more, I begin to put order in my belongings. I get satisfaction from perfect order in my papers, in my clothes, in the house. I carry this to excess. As if unable to organize and control my life, I seek to exert this on the world of objects.

Anaïs Nin
Nowhere is inhumanity more revealed than in hospitals.

Anaïs Nin
To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.

Anaïs Nin
Perhaps the only magician we have is the artist.

Anaïs Nin
It is difficult to live with the pure. They do not condemn you; they forgive you. This forgiveness is more terrible than a judgment.

Anaïs Nin
America hates the artist. It will not admit: the artist is my soul and I want to kill off my soul.

Anaïs Nin
All the art of analysis consists in saying a truth only when the other person is ready for it, has been prepared for it by an organic process of gradation and evolution.

Anaïs Nin
The times in his studio when he washed his hands and they smoked, for his hands were so warm and the water so cold.

Anaïs Nin
Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it.

Anaïs Nin
A trite word is an overused word which has lost its identity like an old coat in a second-hand shop. The familiar grows dull and we no longer see, hear, or taste it.

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

Anaïs Nin
He was insane with anger. Or is all insanity anger?

Anaïs Nin
Paris-New York, the two high tension magnetic poles between life, life of the senses, of the spirit in Paris, and life in action in New York.

Anaïs Nin
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.

Anaïs Nin
I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers.

Anaïs Nin