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 you have never been before... to test yout limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossum.
The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.
Instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse’s, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle testing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into this mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation - indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert.
He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity.
The obstacle became his alibi for weakness.
I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.
We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.
Your strength is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same.
We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.
myself ... is merely an instrument to connect life and a myth
You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.
she acquired the certainty of the expansion of time by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity of experience.
He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it.
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection