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What We Call Our Destiny Is Truly Our Character And That Character Can Be Altered. The Knowledge That We Are Responsible For Our Actions And Attitudes Does Not Need To Be Discouraging, Because It Also Means That We Are Free To Change This Destiny. One Is Not In Bondage To The Past, Which Has Shaped Our Feelings, To Race, Inheritance, Background. All This Can Be Altered If We Have The Courage To Examine How It Formed Us. We Can Alter The Chemistry Provided We Have The Courage To Dissect The Elements.

-Anais Nin

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What We Call Our

Anais Nin

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What We Call Our Destiny Is Truly Our Character And That Character Can Be Altered. The Knowledge That We Are Responsible For Our Actions And Attitudes Does Not Need To Be Discouraging, Because It Also Means That We Are Free To Change This Destiny. One Is Not In Bondage To The Past, Which Has Shaped Our Feelings, To Race, Inheritance, Background. All This Can Be Altered If We Have The Courage To Examine How It Formed Us. We Can Alter The Chemistry Provided We Have The Courage To Dissect The Elements.

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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.

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The Truly Faithless One Is The One Who Makes Love To Only A Fraction Of You. And Denies The Rest.

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

Violence Is A Symptom Of Impotence.

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

The Dream Has To Be Translated Into Reality.

My Diary Seems To Keep Me Whole.

This Image Of Herself As A Not Ordinary Women, An Image Which Was Trembling Now In His Eyes, Might Suddenly Disappear. Nothing More Difficult To Live Up To Than Men's Dreams.

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

The Earth Is Heavy And Opaque Without Dreams.

Too Late For Changes, Too Late Perhaps For Explanations And Ideological Webs, But The Love Goes On, The Love Goes On, Blind To Laws And Warnings And Even To Wisdom And To Fears. And Whatever That Love Is, Perhaps An Illusion Of A New Love, I Want It, I Cant Resist It, My Whole Being Melts In One Kiss, My Knowledge Melts, My Fears Melt, My Blood Dances, My Legs Open.

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

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

The Period Without The Diary Remains An Ordeal. Every Evening I Want My Diary As One Wants Opium.

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

Each Contact With A Human Being Is So Rare, So Precious, One Should Preserve It.

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

To Love And To Labor Is The Sum Of Living.

Jazz Is The Music Of The Body. The Breath Comes Through Brass. It Is The Body's Breath, And The Strings' Wails And Moans Are Echoes Of The Body's Music. It Is The Body's Vibrations Which Ripple From The Fingers. And The Mystery Of The Withheld Theme, Known To Jazz Musicians Alone, Is Like The Mystery Of Our Secret Life. We Give To Others Only Peripheral Improvisations.

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

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.

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

In My Childhood Diary I Wrote: “i Have Decided That It Is Better Not To Love Anyone, Because When You Love People, Then You Have To Be Separated From Them, And That Hurts Too Much.

She Makes Use Of The Soft Of The Bread For A Napkin. She Falls Asleep At Times With Shoes On, On Unmade Beds. When A Little Money Comes In, June Buys Delicacies, Strawberries In The Winter, Caviar And Bath Salts.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I Am Quite Wiling To Confide Entirely In Human Being, Except That At Some Moment Or Another Human Beings Get Preoccupied, Moody, Busy, Inattentive, And There Come An End To The Interest, And This Never Happens In A Journal!

Again I Take A Taxi To Clichy Address, But Feel That I Do Not Want To Go On Loving Henry More Actively Than He Loves Me (having Realized That Nobody Will Ever Love Me In That Overabundant, Overexpressive, Overthoughtful, Overhuman Way I Love People), And So I Will Wait For Him. So I Ask Taxi Driver To Drop Me At The Galeries Lafayette, Where I Begin To Look For A New Hat And To Shop For Christmas. Pride? I Don't Know. A Kind Of Wise Retreat. I Need People Too Much. So I Bury My Gigantic Defect, My Overflow Of Love, Under Trivialities, Like A Child. I Amuse Myself With A New Hat.

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.

You Cannot Save People. You Can Only Love Them.

Life Is A Full Circle, Widening Until It Joins The Circle Motions Of The Infinite.

Through Love, Through Friendship, A Heart Lives More Than One Life.

I Sleep With My Feet On Moss Carpets, My Branches In The Cotton Of The Clouds.

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.

I Don't Hear Your Words: Your Voice Reverberates Against My Body Like Another Kind Of Caress, Another Kind Of Penetration. I Have No Power Over Your Voice. It Comes Straight From You Into Me. I Could Stuff My Ears And It Would Find Its Way Into My Blood And Make It Rise.

The Source Of Sexual Power Is Curiosity, Passion. You Are Watching Its Little Flame Die Of Asphyxiation.

Acapulco In The Sunset Seems Like A Balm; It Enters The Blood Like A Drug After One Inhalation Of The Scent Of Flowers, One Glimpse Of The Bay Iridescent Like Silk, The Sunset Like The Inside Of A Shell, So Much Like The Flesh Of Venus.

Tranquillity Is Contagious, Peace Is Contagious. One Only Thinks Of The Contagiousness Of Illness, But There Is The Contagion Of Serenity And Joy.

You Don't Find Love, It Finds You. It's Got A Little Bit To Do With Destiny, Fate, And What's Written In The Stars.

It Amazes Me That You Feel That Each Time You Write A Story You Give Away One Of Your Dreams And You Feel The Poorer For It. But Then You Have Not Thought That This Dream Is Planted In Others, Others Begin To Live It Too, It Is Shared, It Is The Beginning Of Friendship And Love. How Is This World Made Which You Enjoy, The Friends Around Me That You Love? They Came Because I First Gave Away My Stories.

... Only Love Begets Love.

Sometimes We Reveal Ourselves When We Are Least Like Ourselves.

We Efface An Hour By Passionate Love, Without Twists, Without Aftertaste. When It Is Finished, It Is Not Finished, We Lie Still In Each Other's Arms Lulled By Our Love, By Tenderness -- Sensuality In Which The Whole Being Can Participate.

The Real Wonders Of Life Lie In The Depths. Exploring The Depths For Truths Is The Real Wonder Which The Child And The Artist Know: Magic And Power Lie In Truth.

She Had Lost Herself Somewhere Along The Frontier Between Her Inventions, Her Stories, Her Fantasies And Her True Self. The Boundaries Had Become Effaced, The Tracks Lost, She Had Walked Into Pure Chaos, And Not A Chaos Which Carried Her Like The Galloping Of Romantic Riders In Operas And Legends, But Which Suddenly Revealed The Stage Props: A Papier-mâché Horse.

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.

Living Never Wore One Out So Much As The Effort Not To Live.

The True Liberation Of Eroticism Lies In Accepting The Fact That There Are A Million Facets To It, A Million Forms Of Eroticism, A Million Objects Of It, Situations, Atmospheres, And Variations. We Have, First Of All, To Dispense With Guilt Concerning Its Expansion, Then Remain Open To It's Surprises, Varied Expressions, And Mingle It With Dreams, Fantasies, And Emotion For It To Attain Its Highest Potency.

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 Have No Brakes On...analysis Is For Those Who Are Paralyzed By Life.

I Love Your Silences, They Are Like Mine.

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

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.

I Stopped Loving My Father A Long Time Ago. What Remained Was The Slavery To A Pattern.

When I Cannot Bear Outer Pressures Anymore, I Begin To Put Order In My Belongings...as If Unable To Organize And Control My Life, I Seek To Exert This On The World Of Objects.

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.

The Possession Of Knowledge Does Not Kill The Sense Of Wonder And Mystery. There Is Always More Mystery.

Our Love Lives Because I Live.

Only When The Poet And The Scientist Work In Unison Will We Have Living Experiences And Knowledge Of The Marvels Of The Universe As They Are Being Discovered.

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.

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.

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

There Are Books Which We Read Early In Life, Which Sink Into Our Consciousness And Seem To Disappear Without Leaving A Trace. And Then One Day We Find, In Some Summing-up Of Our Life And Put Attitudes Towards Experience, That Their Influence Has Been Enormous.

People Living Deeply Have No Fear Of Death.

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 Don’t Really Want To Become Normal, Average, Standard. I Want Merely To Gain In Strength, In The Courage To Live Out My Life More Fully, Enjoy More, Experience More. I Want To Develop Even More Original And More Unconventional Traits

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

Leaves In The Wind

I Cannot Concentrate All My Friendship On Any Single One Of My Friends Because No One Is Complete Enough In Himself.

Cute Best Friend

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.

I Write Emotional Algebra.

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

We Did Not Touch Each Other. We Were Both Leaning Over The Abyss.

The Basis Of Insincerity Is The Idealized Image We Hold Of Ourselves And Wish To Impose On Others.

We Don't See Things As They Are, We See Them As We Are." Life Shrinks Or Expands In Proportion To One's Courage "people Living Deeply Have No Fear Of Death.

Inspirational Life

A Man Fell In Love With Jeanne, And She Tried To Love Him. But She Complained That He Uttered Such Ordinary Words, That He Could Never Say The Magic Phrase Which Would Open Her Being.

Poetry, Which Is Our Relation To The Senses, Enables Us To Retain A Living Relationship To All Things. It Is The Quickest Means Of Transportation To Reach Dimensions Above Or Beyond The Traps Set By The So-called Realists. It Is A Way To Learn Levitation And Travel In Liberated Continents, To Travel By Moonlight As Well As Sunlight.

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

Anything I Can Not Transform Into Something Marvelous, I Let Go.

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.

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

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.

..he Made Me Understand Something Very Important. Whether Because I Am A Latin, Or Because I Am A Neurotic, I Have A Need Of Gestures. I Am Myself Expressive, Demonstrative; Every Feeling I Have Takes On Expression: Words, Gestures, Signs, Letters, Articulateness Or Action. I Need This In Others.

Don't Let One Cloud Obliterate The Whole Sky.

Positive Thinking

When I Stand At The Top Of The Champs-elysées, With Its Chestnut Trees In Flower, Its Undulations Of Shining Cars, Its White Spaciousness, I Feel As If I Were Biting Into A Utopian Fruit, Something Velvety And Lustrous And Rich And Vivid.

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 Violence And Obscenity Are Left Unadulterated, As Manifestation Of The Mystery And Pain Which Ever Accompanies The Act Of Creation.

Stations And Airports Are Rehearsals For Separations By Death.

I Palliate The Sufferings Of Others. Yes I See Myself As Softening The Blows, Dissolving Acids, Neutralizing Poisons, Every Moment Of The Day. I Try To Fulfill The Wishes Of Others, To Perform Miracles. I Exert Myself Performing Miracles.

Suffering Of Others

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."

My Life Is Slowed Up By Thought And The Need To Understand What I Am Living.

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

There Is Not One Big Cosmic Meaning For All, There Is Only The Meaning We Each Give To Our Life, An Individual Meaning, An Individual Plot, Like An Individual Novel, A Book For Each Person.

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.

We Sit On The Kitchen Exchanging These Diabolical Outgrowths Of Overfertile Minds.

No One Was Ever Born Without That Light Or Flame Of Life. Some Event, Some Person Stifles Or Drowns It Altogether. I Was Always Tempted To Resuscitate Such Men By My Own Joyousness Or Luminosity.when I Break Glasses In A Night Club, As The Russians Do, When My Unconscious Breaks Out In Wild Rebellions, It Is Against Life Which Has Crippled These Idealistic, Romantic Men. I Respect These Men, Cold, Pure, Faithful, Devoted, Moral, Delicate, Sensitive, And Unequal To Life, More Than I Respect The Tough-minded Ones Who Return Three Blows To One Received, Who Kill Those Who Hurt Them.

When I First Met Him, He Did Not Care If A Friend Did Not Fit Into His World, Because At That Time His World Had Not Been Born Yet.

The Man Who Was Once Starved May Revenge Himself Upon The World Not By Stealing Just Once, Or By Stealing Only What He Needs, But By Taking From The World An Endless Toll In Payment Of Something Irreplaceable, Which Is The Lost Faith.

Often, Though, The Passivity Of The Woman's Role Weighs On Me, Suffocates Me. Rather Than Wait For His Pleasure, I Would Like To Take It, To Run Wild. Is It That Which Pushes Me Into Lesbianism? It Terrifies Me. Do Women Act Thus? Does June Go To Henry When She Wants Him? Does She Mount Him? Does She Wait For Him? He Guides My Inexperienced Hands. It Is Like A Forest Fire, To Be With Him. New Places Of My Body Are Aroused And Burnt. He Is Incendiary. I Leave Him In An Unquenchable Fever.

I Will Always Be The Virgin-prostitute, The Perverse Angel, The Two-faced Sinister And Saintly Woman.

I Walk Ahead Of Myself In Perpetual Expectancy Of Miracles.

In Creation Alone There Is The Possibility Of Perfection.

I Gathered Poets Around Me And We All Wrote Beautiful Erotica. As We Were Condemned To Focus Only On Sensuality, We Had Violent Explosions Of Poetry. Writing Erotica Became A Road To Sainthood Rather Than To Debauchery.

Societies In Decline Have No Use For Visionaries.

Jazz Is The Music Of The Body.

Every Individual Is Representative Of The Whole . . . And Should Be Intimately Understood, And This Would Give A Far Greater Understanding Of Mass Movements And Sociology.

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

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.

I Have A Prejudice Against People With Money. I Have Known So Many, And None Have Escaped The Corruption Of Power. In This I Am A Purist. I Love People Motivated By Love And Not By Power. If You Have Money And Power, And Are Motivated By Love, You Give It All Away.

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

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