The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5 Quotes

“Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. The artist is the only one who knows the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it, he hopes to impose this particular vision and share it with others. When the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
We also write to heighten our own awareness of life, we write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth, we write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write. Because our culture has no use for any of that. When I don't write I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body’s breath, and the strings’ wails and moans are echoes of the body’s music. It is the body’s vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“[Fall, 1951]

To me Acapulco is the detoxicating cure for all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep. It has something to do with the presence of millions of anonymous faces, anonymous people, and the desperate ways of achieving distinction. Here, all this is nonsense. You exist by your smile and your presence. You exist for your joys and your relaxations. You exist in nature. You are part of the glittering sea, and part of the luscious, well-nourished plants, you are wedded to the sun, you are immersed in timelessness, only the present counts, and from the present you extract all the essences which can nourish the senses, and so the nerves are still, the mind is quiet, the nights are lullabies, the days are like gentle ovens in which infinitely wise sculptor’s hands re-form the lost contours, the lost sensations of the body. The body comes to life. Quests, pursuits of concrete securities of one kind or another lose all their importance. As you swim, you are washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“It is right that you should read according to your temperament, occupations, hobbies, and vocations. But it is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar, unwilling to explore the unfamiliar. In science, we respect the research worker. In literature, we should not always read the books blessed by the majority.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“Am I creating my own isolation? It seems to me that most of my acts are acts of integrity. So much takes place within me each day that by comparison I find a paucity, a stinginess, a silence in people which drives me to excess.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“Why did I feel warmed by imperfections, discomfort, and patina?
Because intense living leaves scars, and I could not find such scars anywhere in America. Inner scars, softened, human wear and tear.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“I find a danger in watching films. It is like passive dreaming. It requires no participation, no effort. It induces passivity. It is baby food; no need to masticate, no need to carve. There is no need to learn to play an instrument, to learn to read a book. People stretch on specially inclined chairs and receive the images in utter, infantile passivity. Speech, already inadequate in America, will soon disappear together with the ability to derive significance from the printed world. This is as radical a change as from monkey to man, it is an evolution from man into automaton.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“No rest for me anywhere. No rest from writing, awareness, insights, memories, fantasies, analogies, free associations. Writing becomes imperative for a surcharged head.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“I am most deeply concerned over a trend toward conformity, a growth of anti-intellectualism, which manifests itself in a sneering attitude toward education, science, and the arts. The tendency is to stifle mental freedom, which is the very basis of a democracy's life and growth.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“Perhaps behind our occasional hostility toward the artist and writer there may be a slight tinge of jealousy. The man or woman who for the sake of family life, children, takes up work he does not like, disciplines himself, sacrifices some fantasy he had once, to travel or to paint, or even possibly to write, may feel toward the artist and writer a jealousy of his adventurous life. The artist and the writer have generally paid the full price for their independence and for the privilege of doing work they love, or for their artistic rebellions against standardized living or values.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“For our anxiety is the one thing we cannot place on the shoulders of others, it suffocates them.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it... We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“The only nonhuman existence is what we call our human life. If we live our human life and none other, directly, then we subject ourselves to the most inhuman of all conditionsČ slavery to family and national taboos, wars, illness, poverty, deatah. Even the phrase "earning our living" is inhuman. Without religion or art or analysis to transpose the stark horror, we fall into the malady of our age with its great devotion to naturalism. A painting in a house is there to represent a color, a form, a realm we may not have been able to possess. A book opens a realm which our need to earn a living may have made unattainable. Everything that helps us to transpose the unbearable into a myth also helps the creation of distance from our inhuman life, to allow us to mix a little objectivity with the harsh, violent torments of our human bondage.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“Then I realized the vital necessity of art. Human life, yes, you nurse people, you clean house, you market, but then comes the moment of solace and flight. i sit and write and summon other friends, other forms of life, other experiences, and the voyage and the exploration, the delving into character, the vast expanse of life's possibilities and potentialities, contemplation of future travels, of dazzling friendships, all this then makes the chores and the sacrifices beautiful because they are diverted toward some beautiful aim, they become part of the structure of a work of art.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“Malraux says art is our rebellion against man's fate.
La condition humaine is what I have never accepted. That is why I tried to create my own world.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“We receive a fatal imprint in childhood, at the time of our greatest plasticity, of our passive impressionism, of our helplessness before suggestion. In no period has the role of the parents loomed as immense, because we have recognized the determinism, but at the same time an exaggeration in the size of the Enormous Parent does not need to be permanent and irretrievable. The time has come when, having completed the scientific study of the importance of parents, we now must re-establish our power to revoke their imprint, to reverse our patterns, to kill our fatal downward tendencies. We do not remain smaller in suture than our parents. Nature had intended them to shrink progressively in our eyes to human proportions while we reach for our own maturity. Their fallibilities, their errors, their weaknesses were intended to develop our own capacity for parenthood. We were to discover their human weakness not to overwhelm or humiliate them, but to realize the difficulty of their task and awaken our own human protectiveness toward their failures or a respect for their partial achievement. But to place all responsibilities upon them is wrong too. If they gave us handicaps, they also gave us their courage, their obstinacy, their sacrifices, their moments of strength. We cannot forever await from them the sanction to mature, to impose on them our own truths, to resist or perhaps defeat them in our necessity to gain strength.

We cannot always place responsibility outside of ourselves, on parents, nations, the world, society, race, religion. Long ago it was the gods. If we accepted a part of this responsibility we would simultaneously discover our strength. A handicap is not permanent. We are permitted all the fluctuations, metamorphoses which we all so well understand in our scientific studies of psychology.

Character has ceased to be a mystery and we can no longer refuse our responsibility with the excuse that this is an unformed, chaotic, eyeless, unpredictable force which drives, tosses, breaks us at will.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“At one A.M. we are learning over a bar, Jim and I, and I am stressing the primary importance of the wish. Not knowing what we want, not wishing for it , keeps us navigating along peripheries and tributaries formed and shaped by external influences. I said: "Forget about the probable and improbable. Just a few hours ago I met Shirley Clark. She had no money at all but wanted to go to India. She is a film maker. The wish was the orientation. When an offer came to make a film about French children for UNESCO, she accepted, and it led to her being asked to make film on an Indian dancer. Her wish, for years, was the beacon. The probable and improbable are only negative concepts we have to transcend, not accept.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“Why can't we know those we love are about to die, so as to give them the words of love they need, the last praise or reassurance? We could not bear to know, but that is not true, for it is in the not knowing that is prepared all the sources of our suffering later. We are still like animals; we do not tell our thoughts or our feelings.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“Analysis is like a shock treatment, it throws you back into childhood in order to recapture the reparable elements, to reconstruct the personality. To reconstruct the personality it is necessary to find the original wound. You have to revaluate the past so it will not remain an incubus or succubus.
For example, I look at others with my own eyes, my own values, I evaluate them by my own standards, but when it comes to looking at myself, I look at myself through my father's eyes. I judge myself by his standards, and in his eyes I was not beautiful, I had flaws.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“In America the vast spaces accentuate the vast spaces between people, deserts which stretch between human beings. It is a void which has to be spanned by the automobile. It takes an hour to reach a movie, two hours to reach a friend. So the coyotes howl and wail at the awful emptiness of mountains, deserts, hills.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“Now I know why the fairy tales are full of jewels.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“I cannot accept his death. It will never heal. Because it was an incomplete, an aborted, an unfulfillable relationship. One can accept death when it comes as a culmination, a natural death. But something here, this failure, was like an artificial surgery. Amputation, not natural death.
What I cannot bear is that to survive the destructiveness of others, we rebel, strike out, harm them, turn away. I wish I had been a saint.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“The feminine desire to espouse the faith of those you love as I espoused my father’s and then my mother’s. I only swerved from each as my love changed. I swerved from admiration of my father’s values to that of my mother’s. But I am slowly finding my own. In my life today there is a freedom of emotion, a keenness of sensation, an explorative, adventurous attitude which is mine.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“I feel depressed, invaded by the last because my writing forces me to remember, because that is the source of my stories. If only I could create fiction out of the present, but the present is sacred to me, to be loved, to be passionately absorbed but not transfigured into fiction, to be preserved faithfully in the diary.
The alchemy of fiction is, for me, an act of embalming.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955

“I feel like a fugitive from the mysteries of the human labyrinth I was trying to pierce. I escaped my patterns. I escaped familiar and inexorable grooves. The outer world is so overwhelmingly beautiful that I am willing to stay outside, day and night, a wanderer and a pilgrim without abode.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955