Moriah’s Reviews > The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1927-1931 > Status Update

“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.”

“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!”