Anaïs Nin · 304 pages
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“I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“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.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....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 I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“I want to make my own discoveries…….penetrate the evil which attracts me”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“I'm sick of my own romanticism!”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“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.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. 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.
What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“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.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that...only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“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.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“This great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes air, or swallows a snowflake, or yields to the sun.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“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.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“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.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others' eyes. She does not dare to be herself.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“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.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“I want to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, "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 part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“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.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“I have no fear of God, and yet fear keeps me awake at night,fear of the devil. And if I believe in the devil, I must believe in God. And if evil is abhorrent to me, I must be a saint.
Henry, save me from beatification, from the horrors of static perfection. Precipitate me into the inferno.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress my hairdresser, my make-up, it will 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.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“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.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“We sit on the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
“Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.”
― Anaïs Nin, quote from Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin
Born place: in Neuilly, France
Born date February 21, 1903
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“Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess. And in this it is not likely that all are mistaken the conviction is rather to be held as testifying that the power of judging aright and of distinguishing truth from error, which is properly what is called good sense or reason, is by nature equal in all men; and that the diversity of our opinions, consequently, does not arise from some being endowed with a larger share of reason than others, but solely from this, that we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects. For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.”
― René Descartes, quote from Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy
“In their passion for sameness, the tyrants made themselves more and more powerful. All others grew correspondingly weaker and weaker. New bureaus and directorates, odd ministries, leaped into existence for the most improbable purposes. These became the citadels of a new aristocracy, rulers who kept the giant wheel of government careening along, spreading destruction, violence, and chaos wherever they touched.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from The Dosadi Experiment
“My mother had comforted me with tales ever since I was small. Sometimes they helped me peel a problem like an onion, or gave me ideas about what to do; other times, they calmed me so much that I would fall into a soothing sleep. My father used to say that her tales were better than the best medicine. Sighing, I burrowed into my mother's body like a child, knowing that the sound of her voice would be a balm on my heart.”
― Anita Amirrezvani, quote from The Blood of Flowers
“y juntos
somos completos como un solo río,
como una sola arena.”
― Pablo Neruda, quote from The Captain's Verses
“That's what all love comes down to, doesn't it? We help others only as much as they let us.”
― Megan McCafferty, quote from Charmed Thirds
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