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In The World Of The Dreamer There Was Solitude: All The Exaltations And Joys Came In The Moment Of Preparation For Living. They Took Place In Solitude. But With Action Came Anxiety, And The Sense Of Insuperable Effort Made To Match The Dream, And With It Came Weariness, Discouragement, And The Flight Into Solitude Again. And Then In Solitude, In The Opium Den Of Remembrance, The Possibility Of Pleasure Again.

-Anais Nin

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In The World Of

Anais Nin

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In The World Of The Dreamer There Was Solitude: All The Exaltations And Joys Came In The Moment Of Preparation For Living. They Took Place In Solitude. But With Action Came Anxiety, And The Sense Of Insuperable Effort Made To Match The Dream, And With It Came Weariness, Discouragement, And The Flight Into Solitude Again. And Then In Solitude, In The Opium Den Of Remembrance, The Possibility Of Pleasure Again.

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The Unknown Was My Compass. The Unknown Was My Encyclopedia. The Unnamed Was My Science And Progress.

We Are Going To The Moon That Is Not Very Far. Man Has So Much Farther To Go Within Himself.

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The Unconscious Can Become Destructive If It Is Disregarded And Thwarted.

I’m Restless. Things Are Calling Me Away. My Hair Is Being Pulled By The Stars Again.

There Is No Denying That We Are Suffering From A Collective Neurosis And The Novel Which Does Not Face This Is Not A Novel Of Our Time.

I Have This Weird Obsession About Buying Books And Looking At Them With A Smile, Even If I Won't Read Them Soon. At Least They Are Mine Now.

"we See The World As 'we' Are, Not As 'it' Is; Because It Is The "i" Behind The 'eye' That Does The Seeing."

Self Improvement

You Carry Away With You A Reflection Of Me, A Part Of Me. I Dreamed You; I Wished For Your Existence. You Will Always Be A Part Of My Life. If I Love You, It Must Be Because We Shared, At Some Moment, The Same Imaginings, The Same Madness, The Same Stage.

Why Do I Doubt Her? Perhaps She Is Just Very Sensitive, And Hypersensitive People Are False When Others Doubt Them; They Waver. And One Thinks Them Insincere. Yet I Want To Believe Her. At The Same Time It Does Not Seem So Very Important That She Should Love Me. It Is Not Her Role. I Am So Filled With My Love Of Her. And At The Same Time I Feel That I Am Dying. Our Love Would Be Death. The Embrace Of Imaginings.

This Diary Is My Kief, Hashish And Opium Pipe. This Is My Drug And My Vice.

Women Always Think That When They Have My Shoes, My Dress, My Hairdresser, My Makeup, It Will All Work The Same Way. They Do Not Conceive Of The Witchcraft That Is Needed. They Do Not Know That I Am Not Beautiful But That I Only Appear To Be At Certain Moments.

Atrophy Of Feeling Creates Criminals.

The Final Lesson A Writer Learns Is That Everything Can Nourish The Writer. The Dictionary, A New Word, A Voyage, An Encounter, A Talk On The Street, A Book, A Phrase Learned.

The Only Abnormality Is The Incapacity To Love.

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.

We Three Belong To The Middle Ages. We Have This Need Of Heroism, And There Is No Place For Such Feelings In Modern Life. That Is Our Tragedy. Once I Wanted To Be A Saint. It Seemed The Only Absolute Act Left To Do, For What Is Most Powerful In Me Is The Craving For Purity, Greatness.

Experience Teaches Acceptance Of The Imperfect As Life.

The Personal Life Deeply Lived Always Expands Into Truths Beyond Itself.

I Often See How You Sob Over What You Destroy, How You Want To Stop And Just Worship; And You Do Stop, And Then A Moment Later You Are At It Again With A Knife, Like A Surgeon.

A War Regarded As Inevitable Or Even Probable, And Therefore Much Prepared For, Has A Very Good Chance Of Eventually Being Fought.

The Obstacle Became His Alibi For Weakness.

Sometimes I Think Of Paris Not As A City But As A Home.

I Only Believe In Fire. Life. Fire. Being Myself On Fire I Set Others On Fire. Never Death. Fire And Life.

When I Don't Write, I Feel My World Shrink. I Lose My Fire, My Color.

I Am Lonely, Yet Not Everybody Will Do. I Don't Know Why, Some People Fill The Gaps And Others Emphasize My Loneliness. In Reality Those Who Satisfy Me Are Those Who Simply Allow Me To Live With My ''idea Of Them.

The Dream Was Always Running Ahead Of Me. To Catch Up, To Live For A Moment In Unison With It, That Was The Miracle.

Life Is Truly Known Only To Those Who Suffer, Lose, Endure Adversity And Stumble From Defeat To Defeat.

The Child Who Is Uprooted Begins To Recognize That What He Builds Within Himself Is What Will Endure, What Will Withstand Shattering Experiences.

The Same Chemicals Were Used In The Cooking As Were Used On The Composition Of Her Own Being: Only Those Which Caused The Most Violent Reaction, Contradiction, And Teasing, The Refusal To Answer Questions But The Love Of Putting Them, And All The Strong Spices Of Human Relationship Which Bore A Relation To Black Pepper, Paprika, Soybean Sauce, Ketchup And Red Peppers.

Descendants Of Pigeons Once Fed By Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin And Many Other Famous Lovers Are Still Being Fed, And The Sudden Sound When They All Rise Together, Frightened Away, Is Like The Sound Of Giant Sails Flapping.

There Is A Resemblance Between Men And Women, Not A Contrast. When A Man Begins To Recognize His Feeling, The Two Unite. When Men Accept The Sensitive Side Of Themselves, They Come Alive.

I Adore The Struggle You Carry In Yourself. I Adore Your Terrifying Sincerity.

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 Human Father Has To Be Confronted And Recognized As Human, As Man Who Created A Child And Then, By His Absence, Left The Child Fatherless And Then Godless.

It's All Right For A Woman To Be, Above All, Human. I Am A Woman First Of All.

A Man Who Lives Unrelated To Other Human Beings Dies. But A Man Who Lives Unrelated To Himself Also Dies.

The Struggle To Emerge Out Of The Past, Clean Of Memories; The Inadequacy Of Our Hearts To Cut Life Into Separate And Final Portions; The Pain Of This Constant Ambivalence And Interrelation Of Emotions; The Hunger For Frontiers Against Which We Might Learn As Upon Closed Doors Before We Proceed Forward; The Struggle Against Diffusion, New Beginnings, Against Finality In Acts Without Finality Or End, In Our Cursedly Repercussive Being.

The Body Is An Instrument Which Only Gives Off Music When It Is Used As A Body.

Since Desire Always Goes Towards That Which Is Our Direct Opposite, It Forces Us To Love That Which Will Make Us Suffer.

For All Of My Patients Sensuality Is A Giving In To 'the Low Side Of Their Nature.' Puritanism Is Powerful And Distorts Their Life With A Total Anesthesia Of The Senses. If You Atrophy One Sense, You Also Atrophy All The Others, A Sensuous And Physical Connection With Nature, With Art, With Food, With Other Human Beings.

When Your Beauty Struck Me, It Dissolved Me. Deep Down, I Am Not Different From You. I Dreamed You, I Wished For Your Existence. I See In You That Part Of Me Which Is You. I Surrender My Sincerity Because If I Love You It Means We Share The Same Fantasies, We Share The Same Madness.

It Is The Function Of Art To Renew Our Perception. What We Are Familiar With We Cease To See. The Writer Shakes Up The Familiar Scene, And, As If By Magic, We See A New Meaning In It.

Writers Do Not Live One Life, They Live Two. There Is The Living And Then There Is The Writing. There Is The Second Tasting, The Delayed Reaction.

I Must Know, He Thinks. It Must Be Clear To Me. There Is A World Which Is Closed To Him, A World Of Shadings, Gradations, Nuances, And Subtleties. He Is A Genius And Yet He Is Too Explicit. June Slips Between His Fingers. You Cannot Posses Without Loving.

It Is Easy To Love And There Are So Many Ways To Do It.

Violence Is A Symptom Of Impotence.

Had I Not Created My Whole World, I Would Certainly Have Died In Other People’s.

We Are Never Trapped Unless We Choose To Be.

It Is Possible I Never Learned The Names Of Birds In Order To Discover The Bird Of Peace, The Bird Of Paradise, The Bird Of The Soul, The Bird Of Desire. It Is Possible I Avoided Learning The Names Of Composers And Their Music The Better To Close My Eyes And Listen To The Mystery Of All Music As An Ocean. It May Be I Have Not Learned Dates In History In Order To Reach The Essence Of Timelessness. It May Be I Never Learned Geography The Better To Map My Own Routes And Discover My Own Lands. The Unknown Was My Compass. The Unknown Was My Encyclopedia. The Unnamed Was My Science And Progress.

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When I Hear Of People Who Weary Of Each Other, I Believe It Is Because They Have Sought Virtues In Themselves Alone, Attractions Of Physical Beauty. Have They Based Their Love On Each Other's Thoughts? Who Can Weary Of Thoughts Which Change Every Day?

There Is A Fissure In My Vision And Madness Will Always Rush Through.

But I Lie. I Embellish. My Words Are Not Deep Enough. They Disguise, They Conceal. I Will Not Rest Until I Have Told Of My Descent Into A Sensuality Which Was As Dark, As Magnificent, As Wild, As My Moments Of Mystic Creation Have Been Dazzling, Ecstatic, Exalted.

He Has, Like Me, A Sense Of Smell. I Let Him Inhale Me, Then I Slip Away.

I Have Seen Romanticism Outlast The Realistic. I Have Seen Men Forget The Beautiful Women They Have Possessed, Forget The Prostitutes, And Remember The First Woman They Idolized, The Woman They Could Never Have. The Woman Who Aroused Them Romantically Holds Them.

Innocence Was Gone From All Our Acts. Our Habitual State Of Rebellion Became A Serious Political Crime.

And The Day Came When The Risk To Remain Tight In A Bud Was More Painful Than The Risk It Took To Blossom.

I Was Stirred Only Like A Leaf In The Wind, That Is All. . .

Leaves In The Wind

The Important Task Of Literature Is To Free Man, Not To Censor Him, And That Is Why Puritanism Was The Most Destructive And Evil Force Which Ever Oppressed People And Their Literature: It Created Hypocrisy, Perversion, Fears, Sterility.

At Sixteen, Sabina Took Moon Baths, First Of All, Because Everyone Else Took Sun Baths, And Second, She Admitted, Because She Had Been Told It Was Dangerous.

We Cannot Cure The Evils Of Politics With Politics.

Great Repressions Create Dualities.

He Understands My Pity For His Ridiculous, Humiliating Physical Necessity.

Introspection Is A Devouring Monster. You Have To Feed It With Much Material, Much Experience, Many People, Many Places, Many Loves, Many Creations, And Then It Ceases Feeding On You.

Everything With Me Is Either Worship And Passion Or Pity And Understanding. I Hate Rarely, Though When I Hate. I Hate Murderously.

He Was Jealous Of Her Future, And She Of His Past.

Each Friend Represents A World In Us.

... And The Very Folds Of The Curtains Contained Secrets And Sighs.

I Want To Hear Raucous Music, To See Faces, To Brush Against Bodies, To Drink Fiery Benedictine. Beautiful Women And Handsome Men Arouse Fierce Desires In Me. I Want To Dance. I Want Drugs. I Want To Know Perverse People, To Be Intimate With Them. I Never Look At Naive Faces. I Want To Bite Into Life, And To Be Torn By It.

The Only Transformer And Alchemist That Turns Everything Into Gold Is Love. The Only Magic Against Death, Aging, Ordinary Life, Is Love.

All Of My Creation Is An Effort To Weave A Web Of Connection With The World: I Am Always Weaving It Because It Was Once Broken.

The Enemy Of A Love Is Never Outside, It's Not A Man Or Woman, It's What We Lack In Ourselves.

I Love Your Silences, They Are Like Mine. You Are The Only Being Before Whom I Am Not Distressed By My Own Silences. You Have A Vehement Silence, One Feels It Is Charged With Essences, It Is A Strangely Alive Silence, Like A Trap Open Over A Well, From Which One Can Hear The Secret Murmur Of The Earth Itself.

You Cannot Save People. You Can Only Love Them.

The Diary Taught Me That It Is In The Moments Of Emotional Crisis That Human Beings Reveal Themselves Most Accurately. I Learned To Choose The Heightened Moments Because They Are The Moments Of Revelation.

Good Things Happen To Those Who Hustle.

Hustle And Bustle

She Was Fully, Painfully Aware That Very Rarely Did Midnight Strike In Two Hearts At Once, Very Rarely Did Midnight Arouse Two Different Equal Desires, And That Any Dislocation In This, Any Indifference, Was An Indication Of Disunity, Of The Difficulties, The Impossibilities Of Fusion Between Two Human Beings.

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.

Sometimes We Reveal Ourselves When We Are Least Like Ourselves.

I Postpone Death By Living, By Suffering, By Error, By Risking, By Giving, By Losing.

For You And For Me The Highest Moment, The Keenest Joy, Is Not When Our Minds Dominate But When We Lose Our Minds, And You And I Both Lose It In The Same Way, Through Love.

My Ideas Usually Come Not At My Desk Writing But In The Midst Of Living.

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.

Falling In Love

The Earth Is Heavy And Opaque Without Dreams.

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.

I Want To Make My Own Discoveries…….penetrate The Evil Which Attracts Me

Things Aren't The Way They Are, They're The Way You Are

If All Of Us Acted In Unison As I Act Individually There Would Be No Wars And No Poverty. I Have Made Myself Personally Responsible For The Fate Of Every Human Being Who Has Come My Way.

To The Woman With The Least Intelligence, There Must Come, At Some Time Or Other, The Realization That Housework Is Animal Work And That There Are Other Occupations In The World A Thousand Times More Refined, More Enriching, For Which She Is Also Suited And To Which She Has A Right.

If I Fall Asleep, It Is Because I Am Overloaded. I Sleep Because One Hour With Henry Contains Five Years Of My Life, And One Phrase, One Caress Answers The Expectations Of A Hundred Nights. When I Hear Him Laugh, I Say, "i Have Heard Rabelais.". And I Swallow His Laughter Like Bread And Wine.

I Say Quotations Are Literary. They Are Good Only When Dealing With Ideas, Not With Experience. Experience Should Be Pure, Unique.

The Most Important Human Endeavor Is The Striving For Morality In Our Actions. Our Inner Balance And Even Our Very Existence Depend On It. Only Morality In Our Actions Can Give Beauty And Dignity To Life. Albert Einstein It Is The Function Of Art To Renew Our Perception. What We Are Familiar With We Cease To See. The Writer Shakes Up The Familiar Scene, And, As If By Magic, We See A New Meaning In It.

Creation Which Cannot Express Itself Becomes Madness.

Dreams Pass Into The Reality Of Action. From The Actions Stems The Dream Again; And This Interdependence Produces The Highest Form Of Living.

She Lacks Confidence, She Craves Admiration Insatiably. She Lives On The Reflections Of Herself In The Eyes Of Others. She Does Not Dare To Be Herself.

My Life Is Not Possible To Tell. I Change Every Day, Change My Patterns, My Concepts, My Interpretations. I Am A Series Of Moods And Sensations. I Play A Thousand Roles. I Weep When I Find Others Play Them For Me. My Real Self Is Unknown. My Work Is Merely An Essence Of This Vast And Deep Adventure.

Love Never Dies A Natural Death. It Dies Because We Don't Know How To Replenish Its Source. It Dies Of Blindness And Errors And Betrayals. It Dies Of Illness And Wounds; It Dies Of Weariness, Of Witherings, Of Tarnishings.

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.

For Too Many Centuries Women Have Been Being Muses To Artists. I Wanted To Be The Muse, I Wanted To Be The Wife Of The Artist, But I Was Really Trying To Avoid The Final Issue — That I Had To Do The Job Myself.

In The World Of The Dreamer There Was Solitude: All The Exaltations And Joys Came In The Moment Of Preparation For Living. They Took Place In Solitude.

What A Mystery This Is, Desire. The Love Sickness, The Sensitivity, The Obsession, The Flutter Of The Heart, The Ebb And Flow Of The Blood. There Is No Drug And No Alcohol To Equal It.

She Had Acquired Some Of His Gypsy Ways, Some Of His Nonchalance, His Bohemian Indiscipline. She Had Swung With Him Into The Disorders Of Strewn Clothes, Spilled Cigarette Ashes, Slipping Into Bed All Dressed, Falling Asleep Thus, Indolence, Timelessness...a Region Of Chaos And Moonlight. She Liked It There.

In New York The Acoustics Are Good For Laughter, For Life Is All External, All Action, No Thought, No Meditation, No Dreaming, No Reflection, Only The Exuberance Of Action.

I Love Man As Creator, Lover, Husband, Friend, But Man The Father I Do Not Trust. I Do Not Believe In Man As Father. I Do Not Trust Man As Father.

The Imagination Is Far Better At Inventing Tortures Than Life Because The Imagination Is A Demon Within Us And It Knows Where To Strike, Where It Hurts. It Knows The Vulnerable Spot, And Life Does Not, Our Friends And Lovers Do Not, Because Seldom Do They Have The Imagination Equal To The Task.

Notes Fly So Much Farther Than Words. There Is No Other Way To Reach The Infinite.

I Have An Attitude Now That Is Immovable. I Shall Remain Outside Of The World, Beyond The Temporal, Beyond All The Organizations Of The World. I Only Believe In Poetry.

Whenever You Do Something That Is Not Aligned With The Yearning Or Your Soul—you Create Suffering.

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.

Nowhere Is Inhumanity More Revealed Than In Hospitals.

When You Possess Light Within, You See It Externally.

... Only Love Begets Love.

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.

[on Paris:] A City Never Entirely Known, Yet Which Gives You The Feeling Of Intimacy, Of Possessing It Intimately.

Expressing Feelings Is Linked Directly With Creation... In This Ability To Tap The Sources Of Feeling And Imagination Lies The Secret Of Abundance.

I Want To Love You Wildly. I Don’t Want Words, But Inarticulate Cries, Meaningless, From The Bottom Of My Most Primitive Being, That Flow From My Belly Like Honey. A Piercing Joy, That Leaves Me Empty, Conquered, Silenced.

I Am Apparently Gentle, Unstable, And Full Of Pretenses. I Will Die A Poet Killed By The Nonpoets, Will Renounce No Dream, Resign Myself To No Ugliness, Accept Nothing Of The World But The One I Made Myself. I Wrote, Lived, Loved Like Don Quixote, And On The Day Of My Death I Will Say: ‘excuse Me, It Was All A Dream,’ And By That Time I May Have Found One Who Will Say: ‘not At All, It Was True, Absolutely True.’

The Personal, If It Is Deep Enough, Becomes Universal, Mythical, Symbolic.

I Prefer By Far The Warmth And Softness To Mere Brilliancy And Coldness. Some People Remind Me Of Sharp Dazzling Diamonds. Valuable But Lifeless And Loveless. Others, Of The Simplest Field Flowers, With Hearts Full Of Dew And With All The Tints Of Celestial Beauty Reflected In Their Modest Petals.

The Softness Of The Summer Day Like An Ermine Paw.

The Complaints Of The Child In Us Will Never Cease Lamenting Until It Is Consoled, Answered, Understood. Only Then Will It Lie Still In Us, Like Our Fears. It Will Die In Peace And Leave Us What The Child Leaves To The Man - The Sense Of Wonder.

We Don't See Things As They Are, We See Them As We Are.

Stories Are The Only Enchantment Possible, For When We Begin To See Our Suffering As A Story, We Are Saved.

There Is No Bleaker Moment In Life Of The City Than That One Which Crosses The Boundary Lines Between Those Who Have Not Slept All Night And Those Who Are Going To Work. It Was For Sabina As If Two Races Of Men And Women Lived On Earth, The Night People And The Day People, Never Meeting Face To Face Except At This Moment.

Compassion For Our Parents Is The True Sign Of Maturity.

We Speak Of The Masculine And The Feminine, But They Are The Wrong Labels. It Is Really More A Matter Of Poetry Versus Intellectualization.

The Core Of Creation Is To Summon An Image And The Power To Work With The Image.

The Ivory Tower Of The Artist May Be The Only Stronghold Left For Human Values, Cultural Treasures, Man’s Cult Of Beauty.

Perhaps A Child, Like A Cat, Is So Much Inside Of Himself That He Does Not See Himself In The Mirror.

He Does Not Need Opium. He Has The Gift Of Reverie.

Then At Certain Moments I Remember One Of His Words And I Suddenly Feel The Sensual Woman Flaring Up, As If Violently Caressed. I Say The Word To Myself, With Joy. It Is At Such A Moment That My True Body Lives.

The Poet Is One Who Is Able To Keep The Fresh Vision Of The Child Alive.

I Believe One Writes Because One Has To Create A World In Which One Can Live.

You Must Not Fear, Hold Back, Count Or Be A Miser With Your Thoughts And Feelings. It Is Also True That Creation Comes From An Overflow, So You Have To Learn To Intake, To Imbibe, To Nourish Yourself And Not Be Afraid Of Fullness. The Fullness Is Like A Tidal Wave Which Then Carries You, Sweeps You Into Experience And Into Writing.

There Are Many Ways To Be Free. One Of Them Is To Transcend Reality By Imagination, As I Try To Do.

I Am Aware Of Being In A Beautiful Prison, From Which I Can Only Escape By Writing.

I Must Be A Mermaid, Rango. I Have No Fear Of Depths And A Great Fear Of Shallow Living.

Either One Fails In One's Art Or In One's Life.

I Cheat Him, I Deceive Him, Yet The World Does Not Sink In Sulphur-colored Mists. Madness Conquers. I Can No Longer Put My Mosaics Together. I Just Cry And Laugh.

Some People Read To Confirm Their Own Hopelessness. Others Read To Be Rescued From It.

Everything But Happiness Is Neurosis.

Nothing Too Long Imagined Can Be Perfect In A Wordly Way.

The Self Is Merely The Lens Through Which We See Others And The World.

Poverty Is The Great Reality. That Is Why The Artist Seeks It.

You Are So Terribly Nimble, So Clever. I Distrust Your Cleverness. You Make A Wonderful Pattern, Everything Is In Its Place, It Looks Convincingly Clear, Too Clear. And Meanwhile, Where Are You? Not On The Clear Surface Of Your Ideas, But You Have Already Sunk Deeper, Into Darker Regions, So That One Only Thinks One Has Been Given All Your Thoughts, One Only Imagines You Have Emptied Yourself In That Clarity. But There Are Layers And Layers - You're Bottomless, Unfathomable. Your Clearness Is Deceptive. You Are The Thinker Who Arouses Most Confusion In Me, Most Doubt, Most Disturbance.

Asia Discovered Two Remedies For The Cruelty Of Man, Art And Religion. America Discarded Both And Is Drowning In Hate And Aggressivity.

Because History Is Only An Aggregate Of Personal Hostilities, Personal Prejudices, Personal Blindness And Irrationality, There Are Times When We Have To Live Against It.

Sexual Intercourse... A Joyous, Joyous, Joyous, Joyous Impaling Of Woman On Man's Sensual Mast.

Our Life Is Composed Greatly From Dreams, From The Unconscious, And They Must Be Brought Into Connection With Action. They Must Be Woven Together.

Collective Unconscious

People Living Deeply Have No Fear Of Death.

I Sat There For Three Hours And Did Not Feel The Time Or The Boredom Of Our Talk And Its Foolish Disconnection. As Long As I Could Hear His Voice, I Was Quite Lost, Quite Blind, Quite Outside My Own Self.

Talk—half-talk, Phrases That Had No Need To Be Finished, Abstractions, Chinese Bells Played On With Cotton-tipped Sticks, Mock Orange Blossoms Painted On Porcelain. The Muffled, Close, Half-talk Of Soft-fleshed Women. The Men She Had Embraced, And The Women, All Washing Against The Resonance Of My Memory. Sound Within Sound, Scene Within Scene, Woman Within Woman—like Acid Revealing An Invisible Script. One Woman Within Another Eternally, In A Far-reaching Procession, Shattering My Mind Into Fragments, Into Quarter Tones Which No Orchestral Baton Can Ever Make Whole Again.

Love Never Dies A Natural Death. It Dies Because We Don't Know How To Replenish Its Source.

We Do Not See The World As It Is. We See The Word As We Are.

Stations And Airports Are Rehearsals For Separations By Death.

One Handles Truths Like Dynamite. Literature Is One Vast Hypocrisy, A Giant Deception, Treachery. All Writers Have Concealed More Than They Revealed.

Jazz Is The Music Of The Body.

If A Person Continues To See Only Giants, It Means He Is Still Seeing The World Through The Eyes Of A Child. I Have A Feeling That Man's Fear Of Woman Comes From Having First Seen Her As The Mother, Creator Of Men.

I Looked At It [revolver] As If It Reminded Me Of A Crime I Had Committed With An Irrepressible Smile Such As Rises Sometimes To People’s Lips In The Face Of Great Catastrophes Which Are Beyond Their Grasp, The Smile That Comes At Times On Certain Women’s Faces While They Are Saying They Regret The Harm They Have Done. It Is The Smile Of Nature Quietly And Proudly Asserting Its Natural Right To Kill.

Our Love Lives Because I Live.

Jeanne, I Fell Asleep Among The Paintings, Where I Could Sit For Many Days Worshipping Your Portrait. I Fell In Love With Your Portrait, Jeanne, Because It Will Never Change. I Have Such A Fear Of Seeing You Grow Old, Jeanne, I Fell In Love With An Unchanging You That Will Never Be Taken Away From Me. I Was Wishing You Would Die, So That No One Could Take You Away From Me, And I Would Love The Painting Of You As You Would Look Eternally.

Memory Is A Great Betrayer.

Is Devotion To Others A Cover For The Hungers And The Needs Of The Self, Of Which One Is Ashamed? I Was Always Ashamed To Take. So I Gave. It Was Not Virtue. It Was A Disguise.

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.

How Wrong It Is For A Woman To Expect The Man To Build The World She Wants, Rather Than To Create It Herself.

At First I Protested And Rebelled Against Poetry. I Was About To Deny My Poetic Worlds. I Was Doing Violence To My Illusions With Analysis, Science, And Learning Henry’s Language, Entering Henry’s World. I Wanted To Destroy By Violence And Animalism My Tenuous Fantasies And Illusions And My Hypersensitivity. A Kind Of Suicide. The Ignominy Awakened Me. Then June Came And Answered The Cravings Of My Imagination And Saved Me. Or Perhaps She Killed Me, For Now I Am Started On A Course Of Madness.

It Is In The Movements Of Emotional Crisis That Human Beings Reveal Themselves Most Accurately.

The Two Men Who Have Done The Greatest Harm To The World Are Christ And Columbus. Christ Taught Us Guilt And Sacrifice, To Live Only In The Other World, And Columbus Discovered America And Materialism.

The Source Of Sexual Power Is Curiosity, Passion. You Are Watching Its Little Flame Die Of Asphyxiation. Sex Does Not Thrive On Monotony. Without Feeling, Inventions, Moods, No Surprises In Bed. Sex Must Be Mixed With Tears, Laughter, Words, Promises, Scenes, Jealousy, Envy, All Of The Spices Of Fear, Foreign Travel, New Faces, Novels, Stories, Dreams, Fantasies, Music, Dancing, Opium, Wine.

The Bed Must Be A Beautiful Place, Not Only Because You Make Love There But Because You Dream There As Well.

We Don't Have A Language For The Senses. Feelings Are Images, Sensations Are Like Musical Sounds.

I Will Not Adjust Myself To The World. I Am Adjusted To Myself.

We Are All Engaged In The Task Of Peeling Off The False Selves, The Programmed Selves, The Selves Created By Our Families, Our Culture, Our Religions. It Is An Enormous Task Because The History Of Women Has Been As Incompletely Told As The History Of Blacks.

If A Person Continues To See Giants, It Means He Is Still Looking At The World Through The Eyes Of A Child.

We See Things The Way We Are, Not The Way They Are.

Shame Is The Lie Someone Told You About Yourself.

The Leaf Fall Of His Words, The Stained Glass Hues Of His Moods, The Rust In His Voice, The Smoke In His Mouth, His Breath On My Vision Like Human Breath Blinding A Mirror.

I Want To Live Darkly And Richly In My Femaleness. I Want A Man Lying Over Me, Always Over Me. His Will, His Pleasure, His Desire, His Life, His Work, His Sexuality The Touchstone, The Command, My Pivot. I Don’t Mind Working, Holding My Ground Intellectually, Artistically; But As A Woman, Oh, God, As A Woman I Want To Be Dominated

I Don't Mind Working, Holding My Ground Intellectually, Artistically; But As A Woman, Oh, God, As A Woman I Want To Be Dominated

Life, Religion And Art All Converge In Bali. They Have No Word In Their Language For 'artist' Or 'art.' Everyone Is An Artist.

I Had A Feeling That Pandora's Box Contained The Mysteries Of Woman's Sensuality, So Different From A Man's And For Which Man's Language Was So Inadequate. The Language Of Sex Had Yet To Be Invented. The Language Of The Senses Was Yet To Be Explored.

Anxiety Is Love's Greatest Killer. It Makes Others Feel As You Might When A Drowning Man Holds On To You. You Want To Save Him, But You Know He Will Strangle You With His Panic.

He Had A Mania For Washing And Disinfecting Himself. . . . For Him The Only Danger Came From The Microbes That Attacked The Body. He Had Not Studied The Microbe Of Conscience Which Eats Into The Soul.

Beware Of Allowing A Tactless Word, A Rebuttal, A Rejection To Obliterate The Whole Sky

With Her Eyes Alone She Could Give This Response, This Absolutely Erotic Response, As If Febrile Waves Were Trembling There, Pools Of Madness... Something Devouring That Could Lick A Man All Over Like A Flame, Annihilate Him, With A Pleasure Never Known Before.

There Were Silences In My Head. I Could Abandon Myself Completely To The Pleasure Of Multiple Relationships, To The Beauty Of The Day, To The Joys Of The Day. It Was As If A Cancer In Me Had Ceased Gnawing Me. The Cancer Of Introspection.

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