Phi’s Kindle Notes & Highlights for Incest: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1932-1934)

the father feels he is crowning his Don Juan career by attempting to seduce his daughter, but Anaïs knows she is seducing him.

2%

she leaves him as punishment for abandoning her as a child.

2%

“‘And on the Seventh Day He Rested from His Work,’ Quoted Negligently from a Book I Never Read,”

Tsksksksk

2%

“‘And on the Seventh Day He Rested from His Work,’ Quoted Negligently from a Book I Never Read,”

tsksksksk

3%

And so my spontaneity dies, my generosity becomes a lie whose coldness chills me, and I wish the three of us could admit ourselves weary of sacrifices and weary of useless suffering.

3%

I am a writer of fantastic pages, but I do not know how to live them.

3%

I do not even want to give anymore; I want to lie back and receive gifts.

Moods.

3%

June sees in me the woman who has gone through hell but who remains intact—who wants to remain intact.

3%

But not for a moment am I crushed. I knew the exact value of those pages, independently of June.

Calm placid assuredness of herself

4%

I love June and Henry less in proportion to my rebellion against suffering.

4%

She has exhausted his emotions, overplayed them.

4%

Or is it that often a much-expected, too-much-desired joy leaves one dazed and inadequate when it comes.?

4%

I sense the termination of it, as I sense, too, that Henry’s love for me will end when he is strong enough to do without me.

4%

Sometimes it hurts me that there should be less feeling and more intelligence.

It hurts me too anais

5%

A tormented, hungry child, desired and unsure of love, frightened, struggling desperately to wield power through mystery and mystifications.

I'm reminded of saera

5%

I will not perform for him or create any mystery, because we need the closeness, and there is no closeness with lies.

5%

all art strains to achieve again such a moment, and the wise men plot to dilute its essence.

6%

Morality reproves passion, curiosity, experience, the three bloody stages which mount toward creation.”

6%

And perhaps when you have exhausted all wars you shall begin one against me, and I against you, the most terrible of all, against our own selves then, to make drama out of our last stronghold, of our ecstasy and romance. . . .

6%

Until now we had committed the error of being tender with each other because of our need of love.

Me with Ryoga, I guess

6%

I had not the strength to wipe you out of my life when biologically, planetarily, emotionally, metaphysically, psychoanalytically, I should have.

6%

We are healthier and stronger as honest adversaries, antitheses, than as friends. I want you to wipe me out of your life.

6%

He is frantic that he cannot exert his negative protection while I am exerting a positive influence of a sort.

6%

it blocks the adventures desired by my imagination—dangers.

7%

She has her moments of weakness, but the next morning she is again tyrannical, healthy, undefeated, marvelously assertive.

7%

I keep her alive by a simulation of love, which is pity.

8%

A character, for a writer, is a being to whom he is not attached by sentiment. True love destroys “literature.”

8%

I have no morality. I know the world is horrified—not I. No morality while the harm done does not manifest itself.

8%

The world forced me into fantasy, and I myself did not want to see the early-morning face of my acts.

8%

No one misses my sensitiveness. Everybody enjoys the healthiness, like a vase of flowers in a room. It makes one cynical to be admired for becoming rosily invulnerable.

9%

understanding wounds deeper than monstrosity.

9%

When I praise Hugh for his human-beingness, he says he doesn’t want to be a human being—the only one among us—as he will get lonely! (Written down per demand because I laughed so much when he said this.)

12%

My little June, you do not believe; you imagine hatred and cruelty where there is only fate. You punish yourself, you punish yourself for also having loved your father. You punish yourself by destroying the love you most wanted.

12%

Henry reveals an amazing discovery: his feeling that June was pretending to be aroused—like a whore.

13%

I tell him all women are fundamentally whores, want to be treated like whores. “You can throw in a little worship, too!”

13%

This makes him laugh. He had been saying, “You’re a great woman, and I am afraid I am going to worship you.”

13%

The acknowledgment of discrepancies, paradoxes, injustices is what makes me old.

14%

What a struggle to be reborn—not to trip again, always on the same obstacle.

14%

Victory is always sad. It always reveals the deformity in the imagination which had created a monster with the perverse desire to frighten itself The monster killed, one finds a hill of cardboard and chicken feathers, colle fer, cracked pumpkins, sheets, chains.

16%

as upon my great divorce from the intellectual world through sensuality!

16%

and I carried my ecstasies around close to me, to be preserved drop by drop, word by word, in the journal.

16%

Oh the falsity, the falsity, the children, the children, the lying children who believe their own lies! As I have believed my own lies, as my Father believed his own lies!

oh god. oh god.

17%

What hurts in caricature is when it approaches truth.

17%

I would never have the courage to abandon others because I know too well the pain of being abandoned.

18%

Now, when I talk to him, he almost interrupts me to kiss me. He isn’t listening! Voilà. I asked for that; I got it. And then I get furious because I feel that he doesn’t know how deep I am!

19%

This, to Henry, explains my rebellions (I am always ranting against society life), the experience of my journal as an outgrowth of frustration (oh, the years of frustration), and it also explains my cold decision to take trips, to take the liberty I need, because I must live as an artist and I have humanly served Hugh, compensated him as fairly as I really could.