Status Updates From The Early Diary of Anaïs Ni...

“I have my peaceful days, when I’m tired, when the rain depresses me, but I am certainly one of the troublesome women of the world. How do I get away with it? Mild manners that betray in no way my nature, nice dresses that divert attention from my restless intelligence, and the habit of writing more than I talk, which makes me altogether harmless.”

“I used to fear emptying myself, but it has never happened. I get empty only when I am with other people, feeling their emptiness, bruising myself against their walled-in intelligence, against their stony apathy.”

“I am happiest alone, with music and thoughts. I like my own company, the sound of my own ideas, and the sealike movements of my feelings, more intense than all the rest of my life…”

“At night I was haunted by memories too and struggled to understand death.
On the surface there is nothing changed, but something terrible has happened to us inwardly. There is a new emptiness in our hearts, a new fear, and much of our confidence and our eagerness has crumbled. So much fever, so much struggle, so much labor, for that sudden end? I cannot believe that Hugh’s father has disappeared.”

“Sentimentality? I don’t know. It soothes the perpetual sadness and pain I feel when I am left alone. I make someone happy, I give something, I am useful. And I so need tenderness, and I have so much tenderness to give!”

“As usual, I alone see problems and imagine storms. I think too much. But I have done my best not to think, not to analyze that fearful thirst which makes me live several lives while Hugh lives one. From the beginning I feared that he could occupy only part of me, that he is the Master of one life and no more. I am, against my will, a vagabond, a wanderer, a complex troublemaker.”

“I don’t know why some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ‘idea’ of them.”

“Hugh compares me to Mélisande, whose character was as clear as water, who was surprised by evil, saddened by mysterious things, who was always far away.
‘But all that is buried,’ I said, ‘I am no longer a delicate, weeping, unearthly being!’
‘Those things never die.’
Unfortunately.”

“All parents are cannibals anyway, but eaters of souls instead of flesh.”

“Calendric frontiers have never affected me, and my life has never followed any conventional design. I only mark Time with experience, and learning and suffering. I have aged deeply in these three years of European life. That is all I know.”

“I felt last night that it is only in film that reality and unreality, poetry and science, can be fully achieved and communicated!”

“Years ago I analyzed ideas, and today I analyze sensations, because my puritanical soul revolts at this new life made of physical impulses. I feel bad because I live with my body, because now I touch life not only with my mind, but with my skin, my blood, my nerves. This physical contact with life exults and revolts me at the same time. It is full of shadows and abysses, full of degradations.”

“Music holds for me the very essence of life, the very mysteries which words never solve, the images which words never grasp. Music is above literature in that it says what can never be said, and it contains all the moods and aspects of life, sometimes in one note.”

“Driving has been something to conquer, and I have suffered. It demands concentration that is painful to me. I have to stop thinking of anything but the road before me and its problems. What an effort for one who is used to dreaming in subways, thinking on buses, freely and at all times.”

“I am not a good critic, and even about literature, to which I apply all the intelligence I posses, I am emotional and personal—that is, I can’t read without feeling.”

“I am inevitably compared to the portrait of Mme. Récamier or to some other painting. Some men don’t listen to what I say but just stare. I am touched to think I have been endowed with some resemblance to the old fashioned faces, to faces chosen by painters. After days of self-criticism, self-depreciation, to find myself giving pleasure to the eyes consoles me and helps me.”