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161 " Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved. "
― Anaïs Nin
162 " My attraction to drugs is based on an immense desire to annihilate awareness. "
― Anaïs Nin , Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932
163 " We see the world not as it is, but as we are. "
164 " I love you, June, and you know how acutely, how desperately. You know that no one can say or do anything to shake my love. I have taken you into myself, whole. You need have no fear of being unmasked, only loved. "
165 " I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all. . . "
166 " Dr Allendy said that it was necessary to become equal to life, that the romantic was defeated by life, really died of it, whether by tuberculosis in the old days, or by neurosis today. I had never thought before of the connection between neurosis and romanticism. Wanting the impossible? Dying when unable to reach it? Not wanting to compromise? "
― Anaïs Nin , The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
167 " Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark. "
168 " 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. What was she seeking to salvage from the daily current of living, what sudden revulsions drove her back into the solitary cell of the dream? "
― Anaïs Nin , Children of the Albatross (Cities of the Interior #2)
169 " 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. "
170 " 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. "
171 " I put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all. "
172 " For our anxiety is the one thing we cannot place on the shoulders of others, it suffocates them. "
― Anaïs Nin , The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955
173 " I never lose sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled. "
174 " Wherever there is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me. "
175 " Wherever this is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me. "
176 " 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. "
177 " I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence. "
178 " You sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in spite of it, out of anything, any material given to him. The torments and hells of [crazy men], are not for you. "
179 " You are a real hermaphrodite, Mafouka,’ I said. 'That is what our age is supposed to have produced because the tension between the masculine and the feminine has broken down, people are mostly half of one and half of the other. But I have never seen it before—actually, physically. It must make you very unhappy. "
― Anaïs Nin , Delta of Venus
180 " Motherhood is a vocation like any other. It should be freely chosen, not imposed upon woman. "