Loving Anais

Still reading the wonderful Diary of Anais Nin. As such, here are my favorite quotes for the 2nd ...eighth? of the book! These selections aren't so much inspiring as they are beautiful writing (to me).

On a side note; I believe this is post #200!!!!! 

I am excite.

 

From, The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1. Pages 47-105

"I was upset as a child to discover that we only had one life."

"[She has] increased the dose of love as the poor addict increases his dose of drugs."

"...they grappled body to body, breath to breath, tongue against tongue, as if to enclose, enmesh, imprison once and forever..."

"I could not life any longer in an empty world. I must have much to love, much to hate, much to grapple with."

"Again and again I return to poetry."

"Anger incites him: fuels him. Anger poisons me."

"...[she] stopped them an angry way which revealed her love of me. As i f I were sacred."

"To destroy is easy."

"I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation."

"He wills the whole world to fire and floods..."

"Today I feel my past like an unbearable weight..."

"To me the truth is something which cannot be told in a few words... those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning."

"I could already see how contagious a full life can be."

"I keep a kind of shell around me, because I want to be loved."

"...so I cover all this up with understanding, wisdom, interest in others, with my mind's agility, with my writing... I cover the woman up, to reveal only the artist, the confessor..."

"I want my Dionysian life, drunkenness and passion and chaos; and yet here I am, sitting at a kitchen table and working..."

"For this is the moment when I relive my life in terms of a dream, a myth, an endless story."

"I have constructed a style, a manner, affable, gay, charming, and within this I am hidden."

"He gets drunk on words."

"The old pattern of my life is shattered."

 "To be unhappy is not a sign of weakness"

"I have never seen anyone so withered from within, so dead in life."

"...an initial shock has shattered my wholeness, that I am like a shattered mirror. Each piece has gone off and developed a life."

"...writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all."

"Her love was brave and virile."

"The room feels heavy and deeply anchored in the earth."

"Enter this laboratory of the soul where incidents are refracted into a diary, dissected to prove that everyone of us carries a deforming mirror where he sees himself too small or too large, too fat or too thin... Enter here where one discovers that destiny can be directed... Once the deforming mirror is smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness; there is a possibility of joy."

Emptiness and Nin

I don't have anything clever to say today. I am sorry.

When you're in a good place, emotionally/psychologically, you forget how bad things are when you're not. You forget the empty feeling in your head that grows into a gnawing discontent, then a deep, aching misery. You forget how your soul just doesn't seem to accept joy anymore. Every possible pleasant or useful activity is more work than it's worth, because afterwards you won't feel any better. 

This, too, shall pass.

Right?

I have miles to go before I sleep.

I have, however, restarted the Diary of Anais Nin for... about the tenth time. I always start, fall in love, and then set it down after a hundred pages or so and get distracted for a few years.
It's very beautiful, and very much of the sensual, artistic (yet realistic) beauty that I love about Francesca Lia Block's stories, but through the words and thoughts and life of a person who actually did live and love and was kind of amazing. Anais Nin sought a life of both hard realism and truth, and also the beautiful, ethereal life of sensualism; love and fantasies and beauty.
Her many many journals record her (amazing) thoughts and feelings throughout her life, including about friends, lovers, and life in general. She is kind of my literary hero, and there's no (or at least very little) fiction to it.

To entertain you in my place, I present my favorite lines so far from The Diary of Anais Nin (Volume One, pages 1-46). The bold ones, of course, are my favorite favorites.

"I know that human beings place upon an object, or a person, this responsibility of being the obstacle when the obstacle lies always within one's self."

"I had a sense of preparation for a love to come."

"I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension."

"I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops."

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book ... or you take a trip, or to talk ... and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating."

"...then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death."

"I have always believed ... to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels and thinks..."

"She was color and brilliance and strangeness."

"She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself."

"'I will never know again who I am, what I am, what I love, what I want. Your beauty has drowned me, the core of me.'"

"'...if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madness."

"...[we] have paid with our souls for taking fantasies seriously, for living life as a theatre..."

"She is a personality expanded to the limit."

"...she walked into my house and I was willing to endure any pain at her hands."

"Our love would be death."

"We were walking above the world, above reality, into pure, pure ecstasy."

"In his love for her he has endured so many torments that the lover took refuge in the writer."

"I have the power to burn like a flame"

"To be fully alive is to live unconsciously and instinctively in all directions..."

"All but freedom, utter freedom, is death."

"I go out into the world to seek life."

"She is so busy just BEING, talking, walking, making love, drinking, that she can achieve nothing else."

"She lives within chaos."

"You cannot possess without loving."

More to come, I'm sure.