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To Mistake Ugliness For Reality Is One Of The Frauds Of The Realistic School [of Writing]. A Hunger For The Unknown And An Aspiration Toward Beauty Were Inseparable From Civilization. In America The Word Art Was Distorted To Mean Artificial.

-Anais Nin

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To Mistake Ugliness For

Anais Nin

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To Mistake Ugliness For Reality Is One Of The Frauds Of The Realistic School [of Writing]. A Hunger For The Unknown And An Aspiration Toward Beauty Were Inseparable From Civilization. In America The Word Art Was Distorted To Mean Artificial.

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All Unlived Emotions Turn To Inanity.

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.

In My Dreams I Sleep With Everybody.

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

Each Friend Represents A World In Us, A World Not Born Until They Arrive, And It Is Only By This Meeting That A New World Is Born.

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

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.

You Marry The Day You Realize The Human Defects Of Your Love.

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.

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.

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

He Was Now In That State Of Fire That She Loved. She Wanted To Be Burnt.

Inspirational Love

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.

In Creation Alone There Is The Possibility Of Perfection.

I Reserve The Right To Love Many Different People At Once, And To Change My Prince Often.

Different Peoples

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

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.

There Are Very Few Human Beings Who Receive The Truth, Complete And Staggering, By Instant Illumination. Most Of Them Acquire It Fragment By Fragment, On A Small Scale, By Successive Developments, Cellularly, Like A Laborious Mosaic.

I Wanted To Remember In Order To Be Able To Return.

Idealism Is The Death Of The Body And The Imagination. All But Freedom, Utter Freedom, Is Death

To Lie, Of Course, Is To Engender Insanity.

The Morning I Got Up To Begin This Book I Coughed. Something Was Coming Out Of My Throat: It Was Strangling Me. I Broke The Thread Which Held It And Yanked It Out. I Went Back To Bed And Said: I Have Just Spat Out My Heart.

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.

Falling In Love

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.

They Courted The Face On The Screen, The Face Of Translucence, The Face Of Wax On Which Men Found It Possible To Imprint The Image Of Their Fantasy.

Perhaps The Only Magician We Have Is The Artist.

... America Is The Greatest Humiliator In Existence. It Is Always Cultivating The Power You Get From Humiliating Others.

Memory Is A Great Betrayer.

I Walk Ahead Of Myself In Perpetual Expectancy Of Miracles.

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

The Theme Of The Diary Is Always The Personal, But It Does Not Mean Only A Personal Story: It Means A Personal Relationship To All Things And People. The Personal, If It Is Deep Enough, Becomes Universal, Mythical, Symbolic; I Never Generalize, Intellectualise. I See, I Hear, I Feel. These Are My Primitive Elements Of Discovery. Music, Dance, Poetry And Painting Are The Channels For Emotion. It Is Through Them That Experience Penetrates Our Bloodstream.

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.

I Would Like To Have Your Sureness. I Am Waiting For Love, The Core Of A Woman's Life." Don't Wait For It," I Said. "create A World, Your World. Alone. Stand Alone. And Then Love Will Come To You, Then It Comes To You. It Was Only When I Wrote My First Book That The World I Wanted To Live In Opened To Me.

Truth Is Something Which Can't Be Told In A Few Words. Those Who Simplify The Universe Only Reduce The Expansion Of Its Meaning.

Nature Forms Us For Ourselves, Not For Others; To Be, Not To Seem.

I Looked Upon A Clock To Find The Truth. The Hours Were Passing Like Ivory Chess Figures, Striking Piano Notes, And The Minutes Raced On Wires Mounted Like Tin Soldiers. Hours Like Tall Ebony Women With Gongs Between Their Legs, Tolling Continuously So That I Could Not Count Them. I Heard The Rolling Of My Heart-beats; I Heard The Footsteps Of My Dreams, And The Beat Of Time Was Lost Among Them Like The Face Of Truth.

Why One Writes Is A Question I Can Answer Easily, Having So Often Asked It Of Myself. I Believe One Writes Because One Has To Create A World In Which One Can Live. I Could Not Live In Any Of The Worlds Offered To Me - The World Of My Parents, The World Of War, The World Of Politics. I Had To Create A World Of My Own, Like A Climate, A Country, An Atmosphere In Which I Could Breathe, Reign, And Recreate Myself When Destroyed By Living. That, I Believe, Is The Reason For Every Work Of Art.

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

What I Cannot Love, I Overlook. Is That Real Friendship?

Willingness To Explore Everything Is A Sign Of Strength. The Weak Ones Have Prejudices. Prejudices Are A Protection.

We Do Not Grow Absolutely, Chronologically. We Grow Sometimes In One Dimension, And Not In Another, Unevenly. We Grow Partially. We Are Relative. We Are Mature In One Realm, Childish In Another. The Past, Present, And Future Mingle And Pull Us Backward, Forward, Or Fix Us In The Present. We Are Made Of Layers, Cells, Constellations.

I Told Her, "we Have Both Lost Ourselves, But Sometimes We Reveal The Most When We Are Least Like Ourselves. I Am Not Trying To Think Any More. I Can't Think When I Am With You. You Are Like Me, Wishing For A Perfect Moment, But Nothing Too Long Imagined Can Be Perfect In A Worldly Way. Neither One Of Us Can Say Just The Right Thing. We Are Overwhelmed. Let Us Be Overwhelmed. It Is So Lovely, So Lovely. I Love You June.

Big Business And Politics Are Twins, They Are The Monsters Who Kill Everything, Corrupt Everything.

To Write At The Same Temperature At Which I Live I Should Write Nothing But Poetry.

If You Do Not Breathe Through Writing, If You Do Not Cry Out In Writing, Or Sing In Writing, Then Don't Write, Because Our Culture Has No Use For It.

The Love Of Only One Man Or One Woman Is An Enclosure.

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.

Adolescence Is Like Cactus.

Strange, Isn't It, That No Chemical Will Give A Human Being The Iridescence That Illusions Have Given Them? Give Me Your Hat.

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

When We Blindly Adopt A Religion, A Political System, A Literary Dogma, We Become Automatons. We Cease To Grow.

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

If One's Conscious Life Is Too Rigid, Too Regimented, Then The Surface May Crack At Times, And We Are Unprepared For The Strange Emotions Or Sensations We Experience.

My Diary Seems To Keep Me Whole.

I Miss The Animal Buoyancy Of New York, The Animal Vitality. I Did Not Mind That It Had No Meaning And No Depth.

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.

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.

If You Are Terribly Truthful, The Ground Will Always Move From Under You, And You Will Have To Shift With The Constantly Shifting Truth.

Where The Myth Fails, Human Love Begins. Then We Love A Human Being, Not Our Dream, But A Human Being With Flaws.

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.

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.

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

It Is My Secrecy Which Makes You Unhappy, My Evasions, My Silences. And So I Have Found A Solution. Whenever You Get Desperate With My Mysteries, My Ambiguities, Here Is A Set Of Chinese Puzzle Boxes. You Have Always Said That I Was Myself A Chinese Puzzle Box. When You Are In The Mood And I Baffle Your Love Of Confidences, Your Love Of Openness, Your Love Of Sharing Experiences, Then Open One Of The Boxes. And In It You Will Find A Story, A Story About Me And My Life. Do You Like This Idea? Do You Think It Will Help Us To Live Together?

To Write Is To Descend, To Excavate, To Go Underground.

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?

I Needed To Live, But I Also Needed To Record What I Lived.

The Frenchman, By Nature, Is Sensuous And Sensitive. He Has Intelligence, Which Makes Him Tired Of Life Sooner Than Other Kinds Of Men. He Is Not Athletic: He Sees The Futility Of The Pursuit Of Fame; The Climate At Times Depresses Him.

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.

When I Don't Write, I Feel My World Shrinking. I Feel I Am In A Prison. I Feel I Lose My Fire And My Color. It Should Be A Necessity, As The Sea Needs To Heave, And I Call It Breathing.

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.

Art Is The Method Of Levitation, In Order To Separate One's Self From Enslavement By The Earth.

The Preoccupation Of The Novelist: How To Capture The Living Moments, Was Answered By The Diary. You Write While You Are Alive. You Do Not Preserve Them In Alcohol Until The Moment You Are Ready To Write About Them.

Live In The Moment

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

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.

Also, I Do Not Like The Companionship Of Women. They Are Petty And Personal. They Hang On To Their Mysteries And Secrets, They Act And Pretend. I Like The Character Of Men Better.

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

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