Anais Nin
Intellect and sensuality. Words and actions. Reason and emotions. Lots of opposites coexist here, in my life and inside me…..Why am I so drawn to Anais Nin? I think it is because we a lot in common. Not only being raised by a single mother, but the total absence of her father as well. Then there is her passion, her poetic style, her insight, her imagination and her drive to write. On the way home from taking my GRE I read Anais Nin’s “Delta of Venus.” I was filled with desire.
I also recently read a book about Anais Nin. Many people have called her narcissistic. The author of the book I read was a bit more sympathetic. In her book was a quote from Edward Edinger’s book Ego and Archetype. “Narcissism in its original implications is not this needless excessive self-love, but rather just the opposite, a frustrated state of yearning for self-possession which does not yet exist. The solution of the problem of narcissism is the fulfillment of self-love, and not the renunciation of it…fulfilled self-love is a prerequisite to the genuine love of any object, and the flow of psychic energy in general.”
Anais Nin Quotes
Jung: Proceed from the dream outward.
Furrawn: Gaelic word meaning the kind of talk that brings strangers to intimacy.
Anais Nin The Novel of the Future
Dreaming is indispensable to man. Man has to learn to live outside and beyond history as well as in it, or he will be swept like hysterical sheep in its errors. (12)
The dream then, instead of being something apart from reality, a private world of fantasy or imagination, is actually an essential part of our reality, which can be shared and communicated by means of imagery. (23)
Our psychological reality, which lies below the surface, frightens us in a direction, which society’s rules and organizations define as wrong or dangerous. When experiencing such fears, the unconscious mind tries to first control the unconscious by repression. When it rebels, it may lead either to madness or life. (43)
One thing is very clear—that both the diary and fiction tended towards the same goal: intimacy with people, with experience, with life itself. (155)
We should have books not for one person, but books for everyone, books which reflect experience and not a fear of it, confrontations and not evasions, which brings awareness rather than blindness. (172)
In Favor of the Sensitive Man and other Essays
I believe what unites us universally is our emotions, our feelings in the face of experience, and not necessarily actual experiences themselves. The facts were different, but readers felt the same way. (77)
Nearer the Moon
Passion alone does not make a world. (155)
The imagination rules the life, not reality. (172)
One love is more than many if deeply lived. (239)
I live the life of a spy. Spies do not live with their fear. The risk and danger is their climate. They live in tension, of course, alertness, wakefulness. Not trembling. That is how I live. I am aware of the danger, but not afraid. (239)
Diary 1932-1934
Sex alone does not make me a woman…The liberation of the sexual instinct did not create maturity, womanhood. (229)
Diary 1934-1939
Someday I’ll be locked up for insanity. “She loved too much.” This could be on my tombstone. What I feel intensely and always respond to is the aloneness of the others, their needs. Which love makes the greatest closeness, the fraternal, the friendship, the passion, the intellectual harmony, the tender one, devotion, the lover, the brother, the husband, the father, the son, or the friend? So many kinds of fusion! What annihilates the loneliness? …Break and shatter loneliness forever! I am never close enough. I want some impossible communion. I must accept intermittence and loneliness in between. (76)
Diary 1944-1947
I am writing not about objective reality, which is photographic, but as people see and feel reality, their reality.
Diary 1966-1974
Freedom means that no one is able to destroy you, enslave you or paralyze you.
(232)
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