The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3 Quotes

“There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.”
― Anais Nin, Journals of Anais Nin Volume 3

“The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“…For love it is never the same. What goes on inside is never the same just like this music which changes every instant. For love there are a million variations, a million nights, a million days, contrasts in moods, in textures, whims, a million gestures colored by emotion, by sorrow, joy, fear, courage, triumph, by revelations which deepen the groove, creations which expand its dimensions, sharpen its penetrations. Love is vast enough to include a phrase read in a book, the shape of a neck seen and desired in a crowd, a face loved and desired, seen in the window of a passing subway, vast enough to include a past love, a future love, a film, a voyage, a scene in a dream, an hallucination, a vision. Love-making under a tent, or under a tree, with or without a cover, under a shower, in darkness or in light, in heat or cold.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“All of my creation is an effort to weave a web of connection with the world: I am always weaving it because it was once broken.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“I always have difficulty with people who are not openly warm, expressive. I need a certain sign, a certain invitation.”
― Anaïs Nin , The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“Night. The stars and the moon impassive, undisturbed, eternal. A little of their impassivity flows into me. They are consoling. They reduce the intensity and acuteness of human sorrow. I feel less strangled, less oppressed. I transfer to the moon and the stars some of the trust in God I once had, and realize that serenity comes from an acceptance of death. Man’s life span is short. There is an end to pain.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“How to live as divided cells — voilà! Something always eludes the scientists, the poets, the stargazers, the biologists, the anthropologists. Something eludes the informers, detectives, police, lawyers. It is the dream. And what lies in the deformed mirrors of the dream and haunts our sleep is the secret of everything.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“Didn't the old man know how words carry colors and sounds into the flesh”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“America is in even greater danger because of its cult of toughness, its hatred of sensitivity, and someday it may have to pay a price for this, because atrophy of feeling creates criminals.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“I have forgotten my mask and my face was in it. Man”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary Of Anais Nin Volume 3 1939-1944

“Why does a gesture, a walk, stir your blood? What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no drug and no alcohol to equal it.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“Literature, the ultimate gift for expressing the most subtle aspects of man's thought and feeling, may not survive persecution: first by religion, then by the bourgeoisie, then by Marxism, and now by commercialism. The”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary Of Anais Nin Volume 3 1939-1944

“The enormous difference between the relationships you need, and the one you deeply want. The need is created out of an accumulation of negativities, planted by traumatic experiences: fear, doubts, anxiety, dependence, weakness in certain realms, inadequacy, incompleteness. A certain relationship can remove the fear, calm anxiety, supply a certain completion, replace a loss, fulfill an organic insufficiency, lull an insecurity, supply a substitute love.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“I don’t look back with any pleasure at the sacrifices I made. I consider it time wasted. Whereas I do not think it time wasted to be idle, to dream, to play. Very much the contrary, I think.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“We are cruel when someone refuses to play the role in which we have cast him. We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent human being in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“I have run away with a part of my treasures, my memories, my obsession, with preserving, portraying, recording. All of us may die, but in these pages we will continue to smile, talk, make love.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“For the first time I have conquered restlessness, my imagination does not wander to all the far places towards all the far strangers, questing, expecting what? For the first time my body and soul are together, and the sound of a window closing, a door closing, is no more alarming than the wings of an icon closing over a figure praying.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“I was not travelling away from human life, I was seeking my own fulfillment. Searching for heightened moments uninterrupted by life’s daily exigencies.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“Every other illness is understood, shared with other human beings. Not this one. It is mysterious and solitary, it is as ineffectual and unmoving to others as the attempted crying out of a mute person. / Everybody understands hunger, physical pain, illness, poverty, slavery. But no one understands that this moment at which I crossed the street is more annhiliating than a concrete catastrophe. Anxiety is a woman screaming without a voice, out of a nightmare.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“I think now that at the root of all my writing lies the fact that very early in life I lost the desire to participate with others on the basis laid down by society. All I have been doing, possibly, in my work, is to protest and explain wherein I’m different.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“In all of us there is human weakness. The friend is the one who goes out to strengthen this weakness, but not to attack it.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“Man seems powerless to face the truth or the relative truth stripped of all adornment.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“To say that the artist is not serving humanity is monstrous. He has been the eyes, the ears, the voice of humanity. He was always the transcendentalist who x-rayed our true states of being. His role in European culture is clear enough. Here he is given an inferior status, because he is not obviously and directly useful. His usefulness cannot be measured. The artist cannot serve directly.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“Against hatred, power, and fanaticism, systems and plans, I oppose love and creation, over and over again, in spite of the insanity of the world. We live in an era of destruction. Destruction and creation are sometimes balanced; great wars, great cultures. But now, destruction is predominant. People die for systems that are masks for personal power and gain. Against them, I close the door of a small but loving world, cells of devotion, care, work, to fight the disease and madness of the world. A small world sometimes defeated great systems born of delusions.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“Without my books, I would often turn my back upon adventure and become a recluse. With my books, I feel I have a task. I am an explorer. I mist visit the lands I am to describe. When I write the book I use the book like dynamite, to blast myself out of isolation.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“If his capacity for dreaming, imagining, inventing, and experimenting is killed in the process, man will become a well-fed robot and die of spiritual malnutrition. The dream has its function and man cannot live without it.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“No one has described fully the horror of this illness called anxiety. Worse than any physical illness, this illness of the soul, for it is insidious, elusive, and arouses no pity. You have just been caressed. You are walking into a summer day. No great catastrophe threatens you.

You are crossing a street. The automobile does not strike you down. It is not you who are inside teh ambulance being taken to St Vincent’s Hospital. […] But as you cross the street the wind lifts the dirt and before it touches your face you feel as if all these horrors had happened to you, you feel the nameless anxiety, the shrinking of the heart, the asphyxiation, the suffocation of pain, the horror of the soul being stabbed. Invisible drama. Every other illness is understood, shared with other human beings. Not this one. It is mysterious and solitary, it is as ineffectual and unmoving to others as the attempted crying out of a mute person.

[…] Anxiety is a woman screaming without a voice, out of a nightmare.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“In the bus an old lady clinging to her handbag, her umbrella, her gloves, clutching her glasses as if they were going to be taken away from her, as if she knew she would soon have to separate from them because we do not believe in burying the dead with their possessions.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944

“In all of us there is a human weakness. The friend is the one who goes out to strengthen this weakness, but not to attack it. That was why June and Henry destroyed each other, because they attacked the vulnerabilities in each other. The desire to wound is destructive.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944