Mirages Quotes

“Over and over again I sail towards joy, which is never in the room with me, but always near me, across the way, like those rooms full of gayety one sees from the street, or the gayety in the street one sees from a window. Will I ever reach joy? It hides behind the turning merry-go-round of the traveling circus. As soon as I approach it, it is no longer joy. Joy is a foam, an illumination. I am poorer and hungrier for the want of it. When I am in the dance, joy is outside in the elusive garden. When I am in the garden, I hear it exploding from the house. When I am traveling, joy settles like an aurora borealis over the land I leave. When I stand on the shore I see it bloom on the flag of a departing ship. What joy? Have I not possessed it? I want the joy of simple colours, street organs, ribbons, flags, not a joy that takes my breath away and throws me into space alone where no one else can breathe with me, not the joy that comes from a lonely drunkenness. There are so many joys, but I have only known the ones that come like a miracle, touching everything with light.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“I have belonged to you in a way you haven’t to me.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“I felt him in everything. And what I felt was too deep.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“They clutch and cling and howl when I leave them, but how badly they love.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“Break, break, break. My whole being calls for an act of violence, but I still use velvet gloves.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“It was unreal because I live only in the depths. When I come to the surface for pleasure, I don’t live. I live only in passion, pain, depths, darkness. But I try to breathe above of the deep ocean of sensation.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“I do not hold on now. I live openly, ready for the pain, the separations and losses. I am not holding on. Open and free, sad at moments, but knowing the deep joys are worth all that follows. Deep joys. One must be willing to suffer, to surrender.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“That is why I always lie. I can’t have a truthful relationship. Gore’s idealization of me sets my pattern. I begin truthfully, but then I withhold what hurts him, what would destroy his illusion. I hide my psychoanalysis, my real age, my sexual needs, my past lovers and experience, my negro lover, and I give him his dream, his ideal woman. But where am I in the end?”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“I have never described, even in the diary, the act of self-murder which takes place after my being with people. A sense of shame for the most trivial defect, lack, slip, error, for every statement made, or for my silence, for being too gay or too serious, for not being earthy enough, or for being too passionate, for not being free, or being too impulsive, for not being myself or being too much so.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“So illusion is delusion, and I have been Don Quixote, and nothing that I loved or dreamed existed. I am empty-handed now, a woman with an aching body. Lost. Weeping. Weeping. Saying yes to the analyst like a child.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“You must be courageous and ruthless and reckless.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“When I awakened at dawn, I had a moment of repulsion, of shame. When my feelings aren’t touched, I feel shame, as man does with the whore.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“People are miserable and tense because they don’t make love enough.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“I can tell now about the breathing exercises, which at first caused anxiety, sobbing and pain, but which brought release, warmth and sensuality afterwards. There is confusion between femininity and masochism, a real split. The only release I had was sensual, and since it was the only release, I over-emphasized it and became a nymphomaniac.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“I can only make notes. With Staff, it is my idealization of myself and others. Behind my masochism lies sadism. Behind my indirectness does not lie femininity, but a crippled, fearful self who does not dare. Behind my idealizations lie a primitive woman, indirect uses of power, subtle forms of destructiveness, this hunger.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“My body was quiet after the orgy. I felt power; I felt I was taking revenge. I was inflicting pain, being unfaithful, desecrating all the delicacies in Bill and in myself. Wilson, who has big needs, needed me, wanted all I could give, wanted me for a wife, a collaborator, a mistress, one to enjoy power with, his two houses, his position of power, his last ten years of achievement, but I starve him, elude him. He telephones. I inflict the suffering on him that was inflicted on me by another, but only because I do not love. So it must mean that those who behaved as I do now do not love.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“All the tragedy lay in trying to fit a boundless and insatiable love into human proportions, into one love.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“I even take a little pleasure in tormenting Harry. I let him dream all month, and then again I exile him because he is disintegrated, chaotic, unbalanced, because he is sick, the nakedness of his appetite and greed revolt me. His audacity and demands.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“I will inflict upon the innocent Harry my new firmness and power. His worship adds to this new power. Here I am the conqueror, not the sufferer. It is not a story of love, it is a story of power. Poor Harry. I should deliver him of myself, for he has a dream of love. I have made all other women distasteful to him, and he is entirely at my mercy. Every gesture I make affects his body and soul. It is an unequal encounter. Yet he feels he is being given heaven itself, the answer to all his hungers. The hunger of the poor Jewish boy born in ugliness and deprivation.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“Anaïs, beware of enlargement, exaggeration and dramatization. Beware of associating the bad weather, a tactless work, a rebuttal letter, a rejection, with a total picture for despair.


You have courage, but this courage is severely strained by your enlargement of the obstacles and the way you hurl yourself against them as if your life depended on it.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“How criminal to expect all life and joy from one human being.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

“There is a side to Henry that is criminal, identifies itself to the criminal. In Cancer there was a total absence of feeling. Today his absence of feeling for France is appalling, inhuman, after ten years of life there. Why? I have sometimes a feeling for even a particular tree in Paris, a sudden tender remembrance of a certain street. Henry nothing.”
― Anaïs Nin, Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin