Best Of Anaïs Nin's "Incest: From a Journal of Love"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Incest: From the Journal of Love, The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1932-1934).
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Image above: Self-portrait (c.1920) by Winifred Knights |
Sometimes it hurts me that there should be less feeling and more intelligence. I seemed more sincere before. But if to be sincere means to throw one’s self overboard, it was a sincerity of defeat [...] To live without a god is more difficult. The drunkenness of triumph is greater than the drunkenness of sacrifice. I no longer need to do so much to cover the ineffectuality of my inner transmutations, to substitute for understanding.
I need to do little, but with a great deal of strength.
p.8
We are healthier and stronger as honest adversaries, antitheses, than as friends.
p.17 (to Eduardo)
Hugh says art comes from fermentation--no matter what the fermentation is about. I cannot deny that I have done my best writing now, while I am fermenting with victory and power.
p.28
There is a divergence of time, a dislocation of rhythm between the wisdom of the mind and the impetus of instincts and the inevitability of their fulfillment. I am at peace with man, all the men who have hurt me by their weakness [...] I am at peace with myself, and my understanding tells me the suffering I endured [...] did not come from them but from my own inner composition of being, which refused to understand the natural causes of weaknesses and refused not to suffer.
p.30
Always too much seriousness! The smallest pretext to plunge into tragedy. But I know why. The pretext is inconsequential, but the need of tragedy is a deep necessity. It is the descent into coal mines, the exploration. I let myself get drowned merely to reach Atlantis. Old habit. My lead weight. My ball and chain. My compass. My barometer. It makes me laugh.
p.49
Hugh is interested in art, devoted to it, but he is not an artist. I am his ideal justification for his love of power. I am the object, the ideal receiver of this tribute. But he expresses himself through power. Occasionally I have had this feeling when he says to me, “You’re a great investment. You’re a great help to me in my work. I like everyone to know you. Then they think more of me. I’m so terribly proud of you.”
p.74-75
There is no fecundity in my marriage with Hugo. We create nothing.
I should have had children, but I am an artist, not a mother.
p.116
Every day I must say, “Courage, audacity, maturity, face life, face the public as woman,
as artist. Harden. Toughen. Toughen.”
p.141
He [Artaud] accused me of “literary” living, of living romantically. Why not live literarily--why not, when it is an improvement on the reality?
p.235
I am overflowing. I talk too much. I love too much. I want to work. I like the confusion in my head because a whirlpool of feelings confuses my mind and destroys its control. I want to live by my feelings. Artistically and humanly, they are of better quality than my analysis.
p.242
Shut up, rationalization. Let the acts and feelings speak for themselves.
p.263
He [Rank] said the stories I wrote as a child about being an orphan were not to be explained merely as criminal desire [...] I wanted to create myself. I did not want to be born from human parents.
p.292
We talked about my excessive need of truth [...] The desire I had to be true to the immediate moment, the immediate mood. Rank questioned the validity of this. The artist, he said, was the deformer and inventor. We don’t know which is the truth, the immediate vision or the later one.
p.300
Do I arrest myself on the bring of destruction and self-destruction in order to catalyze all into art? I want to live out the June in me.
p.358
Psychoanalysis did save me, because it allowed the birth of the real me, who is religious. I may not become a saint. But I am very full and very rich, and have a great deal to write about. I will be glad of a little peace and a little careful remembering. I cannot install myself definitely in human life. It is not enough. I much climb dizzier regions.
p.403
