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
A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.
The city was asleep on its right side and shaking with violent nightmares. Long puffs of snoring came out of the chimneys. Its feet were sticking out because the clouds did not cover it altogether. There was a hole in them and the white feathers were falling out. The city had untied all its bridges like so many buttons to feel at ease. Wherever there was a lamplight the city scratched itself until it went out.
I'm sick of my own romanticism!
How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between.
He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity.
The obstacle became his alibi for weakness.
My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea, and my eyes are the color of water.
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.
I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all. . .
Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go.
I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt.
The risk it takes to remain tight inside the bud is more painful than the risk it takes to blossom. We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
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.
One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap is the most difficult to make - to part with one's faith, one's love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.