Home > Work > Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932
21 " 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
22 " 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. "
23 " 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. "
24 " The relief of opening one's hand and letting go was immense. But soon after, I tightened again. A desire for revenge, a strange revenge. "
25 " Do you have regrets that we were so overwhelmed? Do you ever wish to live those hours over again and differently, with more confidence. "
26 " Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves. "
27 " 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. "
28 " 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. "
29 " That last afternoon in Henry's hotel room was for me like a white-hot furnace. Before, I had only white heat of the mind and of the imagination; now it is of the blood. Sacred completeness. I come out dazed in the mellow spring evening and I think, now I would not mind dying. "
30 " Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones. "
31 " She was truthful, or I was the greatest dupe who ever existed. I can only believe in our ecstasy. I don't want to know, I only want to love her. "
32 " You cannot do any more for me," I said. "Since I have begun to depend on you I feel weaker than ever before. I have disappointed you by acting neurotically at the very moment when I should have shown the wisdom of your guidance. I don't want to ever come back to you. I feel that I must go and work and live and forget about all this. "
33 " Hugo has been infinitely tender with me, but while he talks of June I think of our hands locked together. She does not reach the same sexual center of my being that man reaches; she does not touch that. What, then, has she moved in me? I have wanted to possess her as if I were a man, but I have also wanted her to love me with the eyes, the hands, the senses that only women have. It is a soft and subtle penetration. "
34 " What does it mean that you have not written me?... Am I a dream to you, am I not real and warm for you? What new loves, new ecstasies, new impulses move you now? "
35 " I gave him the one thing June cannot give him: honesty. I am so ready to admit what a supremely developed ego would not admit: that June is a terrifying and inspiring character who makes every other woman insipid, that I would live her life except for my compassion and my conscience, that she may destroy Henry the man, but Henry the writer is more enriched by ordeals than by peace. "
36 " I gave away my mystery, knowing I shouldn't, yet incapable of anything else. "
37 " He has made me lucid and sane, and I am suffering cruelly from the loss of my imaginary life. "
38 " I want to make my own discoveries…….penetrate the evil which attracts me "
39 " 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. She will be June plus all that I contain. "
40 " His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that...only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it. "