I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her.
How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
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.
You discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom, absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an illness- monotony, boredom, and death. Millions live like this, or die like this, without knowing. And then some shock treatment takes place- a person, a book, a song, and then it awakens them and saves them from death.
A startingly white face, burning eyes. June Mansfield, Henry’s wife. As she came towards me from the darkness of my garden into the light of the doorway I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth.
Years ago, when I tried to imagine a pure beauty, I had created an image in my mind of just that woman. I had even imagined she would be Jewish. I knew long ago the color of her skin, her profile, her teeth.
Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do anything she asked of me. Henry faded, She was color, brilliance, strangeness.
Her role in life alone preoccupies her. I knew the reason: her beauty brings dramas and events to her. Ideas mean little. I saw in her a caricature of the theatrical and dramatic personage. Costume, attitudes, talk. She is a superb actress. No more. I could not grasp her core. Everything Henry had said about her was true.
By the end of the evening I was like a man, terribly in love with her face and body, which promised so much, and I hated the self created in her by others. Others feel because of her; and because of her, others write poetry; because of her, others hate; others, like Henry, love her in spite of themselves.
June. At night I dreamed of her, as if she were very small, very frail, and I loved her. I loved a smallness which had appeared to me in her talk: the disproportionate pride, a hurt pride. She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others’ eyes. She does not dare to be herself. There is no June Mansfield. She knows it. The more she is loved, the more she knows it. She knows there is a very beautiful woman who took her cue last night from my inexperience and tried to lose her depth of knowledge.
A startingly white face retreating into the darkness of the garden. She poses for me as she leaves. I want to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, “You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existance. You will always be part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.”
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.
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From The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol I: 1931-1934 by Anais Nin (via itsfromabook)
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We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
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 ecstacy. 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.
There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.
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From The Diary of Anais Nin by Anais Nin
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It was as if it [my past] had happened to someone else, and the interest I took in its episodes was that of a writer who recognized good material. It was not an unimportant phase of my life, it was my first confrontation with the world. It was a period when I discovered I was not ugly, a very important discovery for a woman.
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From The Diary of Anais Nin 1934-1939 by Anais Nin
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Fear of the world produces crystals in writing. One seeks the faultless, crystallized phrases, perfection, the hard polish of the gems, and then finds that people prefer the sloppy writers, the inchoate, the untidy, the unfocused ones because it is more human. To jewels, they prefer human imperfections, moisture of perspiration, bad smells, stutterings, and all the time I keep this for the diary and give the world only jewels.
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From The Diary of Anais Nin 1934-1939 by Anais Nin
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I have to keep racing to avoid my past catching up with me and strangling me. I have to live very fast, place many people and incidents between my past and me, because it is still a burden and a ghost.
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From The Diary of Anais Nin 1934-1939 by Anais Nin
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I was not a scientist. I was seeking a form of life which would be continuous like a symphony. The key word was the sea. It was this oceanic life which was being put in bottles and labeled. Underneath my feet, moving restlessly beneath the very floor of the hotel, was the sea, and my nature which would never amalgamate with analysis in any permanent marriage…It was that day that I realized once more that I was a writer, and only a writer.
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From The Diary of Anais Nin 1934-1939 by Anais Nin
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