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
It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
We see not what is, but what we are.
What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.
Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their mysteries and secrets, they act and pretend. I like the character of men better.
One discovers that destiny can be diverted, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. Once the deforming mirror has been smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness. There is a possibility of joy.
I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me.
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.
She walked in the shadow of Rango with a great feeling of being taken out of herself, of having no knowledge of what was happening to her, merely a pervading sense of flow.
The failures are not due to any injustice, but to an inner defect. It is always caused by the person himself. Yes, I know, you think you are doing an act of justice. But they will only suck you dry, wear out your energy, nourish themselves on your ideas. After being the most compassionate man in the world, I say to you today: Let the weak ones die, let them commit suicide.
The two men who have done the greatest harm to the world are Christ and Columbus. Christ taught us guilt and sacrifice, to live only in the other world, and Columbus discovered America and materialism.
You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You will always be a part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we shared, at some moment, the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.
I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.
In each studio there is a human being dressed in the full regalia of his myth fearing to expore a vulnerable opening, spreading not his charms but his defences, plotting to disrobe, somewhere along the night-- his body without the aperture of the heart or his heart with a door closed to his body. thus keeping one compartment for refuge, one uninvaded cell.