The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume 2 1934-1939 Quotes

“Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.”
― Anais Nin, The Journals of Anais Nin

“Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once.”
― Anais Nin, The Journals of Anais Nin

“I feel that from the very beginning life played a terrible conjurer’s trick on me. I lost faith in it. It seems to me that every moment now it is playing tricks on me. So that when I hear love I am not sure it is love, and when I hear gaiety I am not sure it is gaiety, and when I have eaten and loved and I am all warm from wine, I am not sure it is either love or food or wine, but a strange trick being played on me, an illusion, slippery and baffling and malicious, and a magician hangs behind me watching the ecstasy I feel at the things which happen so that I know deep down it is all fluid and escaping and may vanish at any moment. Don’t forget to write me a letter and tell me I was here, and I saw you, and loved you, and ate with you. It is all so evanescent and I love it so much, I love it as you love the change in the days.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 2: 1934-1939

“For I am the kind of dangerous dreamer who executes all his reveries, wishes, words, promises, plans. The wildest and the lightest. A wish for me is not a game: it's a creation.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 2: 1934-1939

“In Peru," said Gonzalo, "they cure madness by placing the madman next to a flowing river. The water flows, he throws stones into it, his feelings begin to flow again, and he is cured.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume 2 1934-1939

“Patients weep when they discover they are their own victimizers and not the victim of others. They weep when they discover they are responsible for their own suffering.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 2: 1934-1939

“Men think they live and die for ideas. What a divine joke. They live and die for emotional, personal errors, just as women do.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume 2 1934-1939

“Rebellions of all kinds attract to their activities weaklings who rebel because they cannot master, destroy because they cannot create.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 2: 1934-1939

“He says: 'The capitalistic world killed the artist in me.' He sees as coming from outside all that comes from inside. I know the artist in him must have been very weak to be defeated by this obstacle at all. Limitations, restrictions, defeats, come from within. I am fully responsible for my own restrictions.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 2: 1934-1939