Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.”

Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child-bearing and man-bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her.

On the other hand, it is not by chance that intellectual and sensitive beings always give themselves to insensitive and inferior women. Such men need to suffer. Such intellectual and sensitive beings are generally little inclined to lie. This takes them all the more by surprise, that even though very intelligent, they live in the world of possibilities, react little, live in the pain that a woman has just inflicted upon them, rather than in the clear perception of what she wanted . . . Through this, the mediocre woman that one was surprised to see them love, enriches their universe much more than would have an intelligent woman.

I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept about people around me was that all of them were coordinated into a WHOLE, whereas I was made up of a multitude of selves, of fragments.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

“We are going to the moon,” Anaïs Nin has written. “That is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.”

What kills life,” she had written, “is the absence of mystery.

The diary taught me that it is in the moments of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately. I learned to choose the heightened moments because they are the moments of revelation.

two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning, and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.