Anaïs Nin - The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1966)

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Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine.

Anaïs Nin
I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.

Anaïs Nin
In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action.

Anaïs Nin
Acapulco in the sunset seems like a balm; it enters the blood like a drug after one inhalation of the scent of flowers, one glimpse of the bay iridescent like silk, the sunset like the inside of a shell, so much like the flesh of Venus.

Anaïs Nin
Convalescence. Such an utter weakness that you lie like an animal hibernating, playing possum. You float. You are adrift. Every current is stronger than you.

Anaïs Nin
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.

Anaïs Nin
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

Anaïs Nin
It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.

Anaïs Nin
There are only two kinds of freedom in the world: the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounce possessions.

Anaïs Nin
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.

Anaïs Nin
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. To seek a total unity is wrong. To give as much meaning to one's life as possible is right to me.

Anaïs Nin
The one who travels like a lover searching for a new passion is suddenly blessed with new eyes, new ears, new senses.

Anaïs Nin
Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an artist.

Anaïs Nin
Willingness to explore everything is a sign of strength. The weak ones have prejudices. Prejudices are a protection.

Anaïs Nin
When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking, I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color.

Anaïs Nin
I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate. It was not a matter of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair.

Anaïs Nin
He left me at my hotel at 3:00 AM murmuring: "You're marvelous."

Anaïs Nin
One does not need to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. One need not be branded by the first pattern. Once the deforming mirror is smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness; there is a possibility of joy.

Anaïs Nin
Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.

Anaïs Nin
Big Business and Politics are twins, they are the monsters who kill everything, corrupt everything.

Anaïs Nin
To me the truth is something which cannot be told in a few words, and those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

Anaïs Nin
Notes fly so much farther than words. There is no other way to reach the infinite.

Anaïs Nin
While analyzing so many people I realized the constant need of a mother, or a father, or a god (the same thing) is really immaturity. It is a childish need, a human need, but so universal that I can see how it gave birth to all religions.

Anaïs Nin
We cannot cure the evils of politics with politics...

Anaïs Nin
Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

Anaïs Nin
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.

Anaïs Nin
I have a prejudice against people with money. I have known so many, and none have escaped the corruption of power. In this I am a purist. I love people motivated by love and not by power. If you have money and power, and are motivated by love, you give it all away.

Anaïs Nin
Electric flesh-arrows... traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eye-lids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.

Anaïs Nin
Throw your dream into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, or a new country.

Anaïs Nin