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 will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
Passion gives me moments of wholeness
We love best those who are, or act for us, a self we do not wish to be or act out.
I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.
I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness.
Coming near him like a ballet dancer she took a leap towards him, and he, frightened by her vehemence, and fearing that she would crash against him, instinctively became absolutely rigid, and she felt herself embracing a statue.
At a lecture I am asked to pronounce my name three times. I try to be slow and emphatic, "Anaïs Anaïs Anaïs. You just say "Anna" and then add "ees," with the accent on the "ees.
The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.
Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.
When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.
The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.
The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.
You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.