Anais Nin
Anais Nin
Anaïs Ninwas an essayist and memoirist born to Cuban parents in France, where she was also raised. She spent some time in Spain and Cuba but lived most of her life in the United States where she became an established author. She wrote journals, novels, critical studies, essays, short stories, and erotica. A great deal of her work, including Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published posthumously...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 February 1903
CityNanterre, France
CountryUnited States of America
I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.
We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.
I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them.
Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.
I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.
I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.
I either eat too much or starve myself. Sleep for 14 hours or have insomniac nights. Fall in love very hard or hate passionately. I don't know what grey is. I never did.
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.
Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body's breath, and the strings' wails and moans are echoes of the body's music. It is the body's vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.
You fall in love with people's minds.
Adolescence is like cactus.
I would like to have your sureness. I am waiting for love, the core of a woman's life." Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me.
The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world ...
The bed must be a beautiful place, not only because you make love there but because you dream there as well.