Anaïs Nin - The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1966)

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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
America is the greatest humiliator in existence. It is always cultivating the power you get from humiliating others.

Anaïs Nin
We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth.

Anaïs Nin
We love best those who are, or act for us, a self we do not wish to be or act out.

Anaïs Nin
Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

Anaïs Nin
I love man as creator, lover, husband, friend, but man the father I do not trust. I do not believe in man as father. I do not trust man as father.

Anaïs Nin
Travel is seeking the lost paradise. It is the supreme illusion of love.

Anaïs Nin
I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.

Anaïs Nin
Stations and airports are rehearsals for separations by death.

Anaïs Nin
I would say that compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

Anaïs Nin
The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.

Anaïs Nin
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the action stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

Anaïs Nin
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

Anaïs Nin
In music I feel most deeply the passing of things.

Anaïs Nin
Someday I'll be locked up for love insanity. "She loved too much."

Anaïs Nin
The softness of the summer day like an ermine paw.

Anaïs Nin
Houses turn to corpses overnight when we cease to live and love in them.

Anaïs Nin
You marry the day you realize the human defects of your love.

Anaïs Nin
Death from disillusion is not instantaneous, and there are no mercy killers for the disillusioned.

Anaïs Nin
New York seems conducted by jazz, animated by it. It is essentially a city of rhythm.

Anaïs Nin
The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as a man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.

Anaïs Nin
I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.

Anaïs Nin
I had always believed in Andre Breton's freedom, to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels in thinks, to follow sensations and absurd correlations of events and images, to trust to the new realms they lead one into. "The cult of the marvelous." Also the cult of the unconscious leadership, the cult of mystery, the evasion of false logic. The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud. It is not madness. It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by the rational mind.

Anaïs Nin
The shell is America's most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early.

Anaïs Nin
What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

Anaïs Nin
Jazz is the expression of America's romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force.

Anaïs Nin
There are few human beings who receive the truth complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellular, like a laborious mosaic.

Anaïs Nin