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 adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.
Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate. I hate murderously.
I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously.
Asia discovered two remedies for the cruelty of man, art and religion. America discarded both and is drowning in hate and aggressivity.
America hates the artist. It will not admit: the artist is my soul and I want to kill off my soul.
although I love a rich life, I hate an overcrowded life. I believe in rumination and lose half the beauty of all things when I am deprived of the time to ruminate.
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.
I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.
I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.
I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.
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.
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book(Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom(when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this(or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.
To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one's mind and the psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.
There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.