Anaïs Nin

"I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing."

"I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it."

"This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice."

"Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are."

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."

"In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again."

"And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

"Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together."

"Dreams are necessary to life."

"Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country."

"We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones."

"“I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”"

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."

"In our twenties we have conflicts. We think everything is either-or, black or white: we are caught between them and we lose all our energy in the conflicts. My answer, later on in maturity, was to do them all. Not to exclude any, not to make a choice. I wanted to be everything. And I took everything in, and the more you take in, the more strength you find waiting to accomplish things and to expand your life, instead of the other (which is what we have been taught to do) which is to look for structure and to fear change, above all to fear change. Now I didn't fear change."

"And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon. What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world."

"“We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.”"

"He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt."

"I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern."

"What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?"

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."