Best Of Anaïs Nin's "Fire: From a Journal of Love"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Fire: From A Journal of Love, The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1934-1937).
 |
| Painting above: La llamada (The Call) by Remedios Varo, 1961. |
I loved my dramatic self in June, realized in June.
p.70
Those days when I am not only in love with the whole world, with man and woman, with my old loves, my past, with everybody I know, but also with myself, then the way I see myself is this: alive. I see and love the dancer, the light feet, the efforts at laughter, at lightness, the gravity, and my audacity. What I like best about myself is my audacity, my tricks,my courage, the way by which I am true to myself without causing much damage or pain. The fire in me, the way I excuse and embellish others, my faith in others. What I hate is my vanity, my need to shine, my need of applause, and my sentimentality. I would like to be harder. I cannot make a joke, tease, make fun of someone, without regrets.
p.238
The layers of the city of Fez are like the layers and secrecies inside of me. One needs a guide. Traveling, I add everything I see to myself. I am not merely a spectator. It is not merely observation. It is experience. It is expansion. It is forgetting the Self and discovering the self of affinities, the infinite, limitless worlds within the self.
p.239
I am giving away more than half of what I have; that is why I could not turn toward the larger problems of the world: my individual world, my personal life, was perfect, in giving and receiving, full to overflowing. And such great needs near and around me. The drifting was a drifting amidst fullness and richness shared.
p.290
If I were a real diarist, like Pepys or Amiel, I should be satisfied to record--but I am not. I want to fill in, transform, project, deepen; I want this ultimate flowering that comes of creation. As I read the diary I am aware of all I have left unsaid, which can only be said with creative work, by lingering, expanding.
p.297-98
Since it is my strength they love, it is hard not to use this strength cruelly. I don’t. I rule by seduction, charm, devotion, and by returning with interest all that is given me. If many women think they can make three men’s lives marvellous, let them try. It takes superhuman agility, thoughtfulness, the gift of enveloping, of pouring so much into one our that it seems like a complete day and night to the man.
p.337
My life is tragic only in relation to my unreal conception, my desire for a paradise--an artificial paradise. Henry taught me a great deal of acceptance of human life as it is--passivity. I learned to be happy, to enjoy. But I continued to create what I call an absolute in space, a paradise suspended in midair, made up of various elements, one composite heaven, disregarding faithfulness.
p.374
