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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“I must say this now about that first fire. It was magic. Out of dead tinder and grass and sticks came a live warm light. It cracked and snapped and smoked and filled the woods with brightness. It lighted the trees and made them warm and friendly. It stood tall and bright and held back the night.”
― Jean Craighead George, quote from My Side of the Mountain
“We’re not arguing. We’re discussing.” “You’re a lawyer; you don’t know the difference. I’m arguing.”
― William Landay, quote from Defending Jacob
“We never had any children," he said ruefully. "Our work was our children.”
― Patti Smith, quote from Just Kids
“I've read Reverend Kirk, in fact. My uncle's library has quite a few books of your people. I have read Mr. Lang's fairy tales as well. (Katherine Rae O'Flaherty)
"Books are not the same as reality," Devlin stared at her. "My world is not always kind to mortals.”
― Melissa Marr, quote from Radiant Shadows
“When we learn to work with our own Inner Nature, and with the natural laws operating around us, we reach the level of Wu Wei. Then we work with the natural order of things and operate on the principle of minimal effort. Since the natural world follows that principle, it does not make mistakes. Mistakes are made–or imagined–by man, the creature with the overloaded Brain who separates himself from the supporting network of natural laws by interfering and trying too hard.
When you work with Wu Wei, you put the round peg in the round hole and the square peg in the square hole. No stress, no struggle. Egotistical Desire tries to force the round peg into the square hole and the square peg into the round hole. Cleverness tries to devise craftier ways of making pegs fit where they don’t belong. Knowledge tries to figure out why round pegs fit into round holes, but not square holes. Wu Wei doesn’t try. It doesn’t think about it. It just does it. And when it does, it doesn’t appear to do much of anything. But Things Get Done.
When you work with Wu Wei, you have no real accidents. Things may get a little Odd at times, but they work out. You don’t have to try very hard to make them work out; you just let them. [...] If you’re in tune with The Way Things Work, then they work the way they need to, no matter what you may think about it at the time. Later on you can look back and say, "Oh, now I understand. That had to happen so that those could happen, and those had to happen in order for this to happen…" Then you realize that even if you’d tried to make it all turn out perfectly, you couldn’t have done better, and if you’d really tried, you would have made a mess of the whole thing.
Using Wu Wei, you go by circumstances and listen to your own intuition. "This isn’t the best time to do this. I’d better go that way." Like that. When you do that sort of thing, people may say you have a Sixth Sense or something. All it really is, though, is being Sensitive to Circumstances. That’s just natural. It’s only strange when you don’t listen.”
― Benjamin Hoff, quote from The Tao of Pooh
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