Anais Nin Top 10 Quotes: Diary Vol.1

    Just finished rereading volume one of Anais Nin's diaries...such awesome insight into the artistic human soul. This volume of her diary primarily focuses around her affair with Henry Miller (and his wife June), and her psychoanalysis with Dr.'s Allendy and Otto Rank. The way she questions her own nature as well as plumbs the depths of artistically inclined people (along with their neurosis) is incredibly insightful - especially to one like myself who share's many of these characteristics...and is completely neurotic:)

Here are my favorite quotes from this volume:

1. For this is the moment when I relive my life in terms of a dream, a myth, an endless story... (in reference to her writing in her diary).

2. When a higher moment comes, all details recede into the background. I never lost sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled.

3. Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, & those who are nourished on it are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm.

4. I assimilate such a draught of sensations, wonder at the beauty of women, the magnetism of men.

5. A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

6. A writer is the duelest who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally.

7. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world: because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain.

8. Poetic vision is not the outcome of blindness but of a force which can transcend the ugliest face of reality, swallow and dissolve it by it's strength, not evasion.

9. He (Dr. Rank) considered neurosis a failed work of art, the neurotic a failed artist. Neurosis, was a manifestation of imagination and energy gone wrong. Instead of a fruit or flower, I had borne obsessions and anxieties.

10. The neurotic feels his next statement is expected to fit into a logical continuity whose pressure he finally succumbs to. The more this process becomes clear to him, the more he experiences a kind of discouragement with the banality of it and deprives him of that very illusion and creative halo which is necessary to the recreation of a human being. Instead of discovering the poetic, imaginative, creative potentialities of his disease (since every neurotic fantasy is really a twisted aborted work of art), he discovers the de-poetization of it, which makes him a cripple instead of a potential artist.