Chiles > Chiles's Quotes

“Films are like a dose of opium, then as you come out in the street it’s a shock, and you are brutally awakened from your dream. But when you stay, you never wake up. The dream goes on working. I would fall asleep for a while and then see images on the screen, and I could not tell the difference between the film and a dream.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“Perhaps there is nothing at all, perhaps the mystery is that there is no mystery at all. Perhaps she is empty, and there is no June at all.” “But, Henry, how can an empty woman have such a vivid presence, how can an empty woman cause insomnia, awaken so many curiosities? How could an empty woman cause other women to take flight, as you tell me, abdicating immediately before her?”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“I would not be concerned with the secrets, the lies, the mysteries, the facts. I would be concerned with what makes them necessary. What fear.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“She only believed in intimacy and proximity, in confessions born in the darkness of a bedroom, in quarrels born of alcohol, in communions born of exhausting walks through the city. She only believed in those words which came like the confessions of criminals after long exposure to hunger, to intense lights, to cross-questioning, to violent tearing away of masks.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“But I am not free. I am incapable of destruction.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“She cannot be considered as a whole. She is composed of fragments. Only passion gives her a moment of wholeness.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“She is so busy just BEING, talking, walking, making love, drinking, that she can achieve nothing else.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot possess without loving.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“Perhaps we have built a false concept of wholeness and, under the pressure of an artificial unity, people like June explode and fly in all directions. Some day we may be reassembled into a more truthful whole.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“On what wings does she take flight from Henry? As if the sensual act had been but a mouth applied to an opium pipe.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“I want the key, the key to the lies.” “Passion and violence never opened a human being.” “What opens human beings?” “Compassion.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“Compassion is the only key I ever found which fits everyone.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“I always run away from the simplest phrases because they never contain all of the truth. To me the truth is something which cannot be told in a few words, and those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“I feel that an initial shock has shattered my wholeness, that I am like a shattered mirror. Each piece has gone off and developed a life of its own. They have not died from the shock (as, in some cases I have seen, women who died from betrayals, go into mourning, abdicate all love, never renew contact with man again), but separated into several selves, and each one developed a life of its own.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“we talked about literature’s elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated “dose” of life. I said, almost indignantly, “That’s the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“The more broadly and expansively you love, without exclusiveness, the more you reach the mystic whole, the larger sense of love, the less individualistic, the more universal love.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“Need of security and reassurance can cause criminal acts. What can be removed is the motivation.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“How to defeat this tragedy concealed within each hour, which chokes us unexpectedly and treacherously, springing at us from a melody, an old letter, a book, the colors of a dress, the walk of a stranger? Make literature. Seek new words in the dictionary. Chisel new phrases, pour the tears into a mold, style, form, eloquence. Cut out newspaper clippings carefully. Use cement glue. Have your photograph taken. Tell everyone how much you owe them. Tell Allendy he has cured you. Tell your editor he has discovered a genius, and turn around into your work again, like a scorpion in his fire ring, devouring himself.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“Because I am a woman who understands, I am asked to understand everything, to accept everything.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“She has to make the atmosphere boil.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“J’ai été bon quelquefois. Je ne m’en félicite pas. J’ai été mé- chant souvent; je ne m’en repens pas,” writes Gauguin.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“the writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector’s item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934

“We feel afraid of the impossible in horror because we hold some flicker of belief in it. In a strangely backwards idiom, we say that this requires our “suspension of disbelief,” where doubt is a body that hovers or is hung and faith falls down to earth. It is fear’s twin.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“If this is a memoir, it’s a memoir of a mood. If this is a story, it’s a ghost story.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“I’m a child at a charismatic healing mass where you are expected to drop back, filled with the Holy Spirit, when the priest touches your head with oil. I desperately want to fall when it’s my turn, but don’t. It isn’t right to fake it.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“It’s sad. The ghosts are sad. The ghost story: a genre about sadness. Horror: a genre about pain and fear of pain. Like melodrama, horror is a realm of excess weeping. Pain becomes a landscape.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

“Perhaps more than any other genre, horror gives its fans the gratifying daze of repetition. A ghost always begins by coming back against the calendar. Horror’s conventions are so ingrained that these films can speak in sketches — a narrative shorthand — where characters are types with familiar patterns of motivation, backstory, and behavior. This has been a major reason people criticize the genre, but I find the predictability of horror comforting. Each night at 3 am, I hear her weep outside my door. At home in the returning of a trope.”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God