Best Of Anaïs Nin's "Lectures, Seminars, Interviews"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from A Woman Speaks: Lectures, Seminars, Interviews of Anaïs Nin edited by Evelyn J. Ninz
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| Painting above: Canna Red and Orange (c.1926) by Georgia O'Keeffe |
What I wanted to give you today was a new centre of gravity, because we have tried to live too much within the group and with the notion of the millions, with the sense of the too many, of the outer forces, the external world. Great pressures have been put on us, and some of us, not having something to equalize it in our inner life, collapsed under the weight and felt despair, depression, frustration, and therefore became angry people. And an angry and unhappy [person] is dangerous to society.
p.1-2
So when we make this interior change we do affect the external world. Now everybody separated that and said: there is either rushing virtuously to live a collective life or else there is this selfish introspection and concern with your own development. But the two are completely interdependent, they are completely interactive; and the more you have this response to life, the more you have a source to respond with, the of course the more enrichment you pass around you. Why we made a dichotomy between those two-saying that the two wouldn’t enrich each other--I don’t know. Because whatever the individual does for [her]self and by [her]self is something that ultimately flows back again like a river into the collective unconscious. So if we are disappointed today in the external changes it’s because not enough of us have worked at raising a better quality of human being: one who is more aware, more able to evaluate, judge others, judge the characters of our leaders.
p.7-8
Traumas create this mistrust of human beings, because a human being can hurt you, can desert you, can betray you. Yet I still say that it’s a million times better to risk being deserted or betrayed than to withdraw into a fortress of alienation, shut the door and break the contact with others. Because then we really die. That is death. That is emotional death. It is mistrust that makes us do that, mistrust and fear of pain [...] So I learned that mistrust was the root of the separation between human beings.
p.10-11
This warmth is something we all need, we need nourishment, we need encouragement. Our culture, however, made us ashamed of paying compliments, of saying beautiful things to other people. We were not supposed to. A compliment was a falsity in itself to the Puritan [...] Why do we eliminate that? Why should we consider it false to give each other the nourishing encouragement which sustains us, which is the obverse of destructive criticism, of hostility?
p.11
I came to realize that our need and hunger for closeness, after the terrible period of alienation, occurred because we always blamed alienation, occurred because we always blamed alienation of every possible case except the right one. We were alienated from ourselves. How could we love, how could we give, how could we trust, how could we share what we didn’t have to give? If we did not spend some time in creating ourselves in depth and power, with what were we going to relate to others?
p.15
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| Painting above: Light Iris (c.1924) by Georgia O'Keeffe |
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 a woman, I wanted to be an artist, 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 that is another thing I learned from psychology, that we evolve. We don’t need revolutions provided we evolve, provided we are constantly open to new experience, provided we are open to other human beings and what they have to give us.
p.16
As you exchange, as you share, you are exchanging knowledge. I mean you don’t lose yourself. You can lose yourself emotionally when you love someone, let’s say. You can lose a part of yourself. We have all had that feeling--identifying with a loved one and losing some part of our personality. But that’s a different thing; that’s a fusion with a person we love, which woman tends to do very often. But once you have acquired your identity, you can share. You see when I was twenty I was unsure about what I was, I didn’t share [...] but I proceeded in the diary to build up this self-until I got to the point where I knew my identity, and therefore what I give to another cannot diminish me. Nothing is lost. What you give isn’t lost.
p.28
The restrictions were stronger for woman because the pattern was very rigid and very limited, and she was shut in within her personal world. A few women transcended that, and the women that I used to read about--because I’ve always read women writers, and they were a great inspiration to me--were the women we were able to free themselves, who did not demand their freedom, who were able to create it.
p.35
It [the diary] made me fully aware when me life was stagnant. I was fully aware of the trap that women fall into, the conventional marriage and life in the suburbs. So the diary was a reflector and didn’t allow me for one minute to be blinded or to be diffused or to be confused by the outer images that were imposed on me. My concession was to play the roles that were demanded of me but to maintain my integrity for myself somewhere very strongly.
p.36
So we [women] have guilt for creating and for not creating, and these women are caught really between the two; between the fear of asserting themselves, because then it would affect somehow the people near them, and the fear of not creating, of not realizing one’s potential. I can give you an example of this. I was very obsessed with the idea of growth [...] Now I don’t know where I got the idea that I was growing into a giant redwood tree, or that I could possibly take the sunlight from other tress, but I really did. That was a tremendously erroneous concept, for I discovered that when a human being grows, this growth positively affects her environment, it affects the people around her and actually urges them to their own growth rather than the other way around.
p.37
It is still a problem for me, the question of how to accomplish revolutions and evolutions without violence. Being a woman still means to me preserving and loving life more than power, with which men have demonstrated too tragic an obsession. All history is a struggle for power.
p.58
And today I would like to see marvellous women writers, more of them. I will encourage them, I will nurture them. To me that gives us strength. I don’t understand competition because I think it’s a weakening element. I feel stronger if there is another woman writing and saying things that I can believe in. I feel much stronger when you talk about things in a way that is perceptible to me and acceptable and eloquent. It enriches my world; I feel as if I’m receiving something.
p.95
Yes, but once women become critics, women writers will be in a stronger position. Woman has been reviewed and criticized by man, essentially. Many male critics were very wonderful and others were highly prejudiced. They thought woman’s sensibility was superficial and limited. But I know several women critics who have tackled their work with such vigour and clarity that now, I feel, something is going to happen to women’s writing.
p.103
We’re emphasizing a total denial of womanhood and of think that this will free us, because the image we previously had of woman we found oppressive and limiting and restricting. But it’s up to us to change that image, and we don’t have to give up our femininity, we don't’ have to throw out the whole female concept [...] so there is no reason why we shouldn’t retain that aspect of woman that we are related to by nature, which is greater closeness to nature and greater closeness of instinct and intuition. We did not develop our rationalization as man did; we did not go into science and into philosophy and all that rationalization of what we feel and the final abstraction of it. We were saved from that, and I want women to realize that that was a wonderful thing, in a way. We were prevented from being the head of the oil company or the head of the bank and so saved from corruption and abstraction and dehumanization.
p.104-5
So there is the whole mystery of growth, of expansion, of deliverance from the traps which life sets us, because life loves the drama of entrapping us and seeing whether we can get out. It’s a game, a game of psychic courage, a beautiful psychic game, a game of magic. Every difficult situation into which you are sometimes thrown has some kind of opening somewhere, even if it is only by the way of the dream-the way I transformed childhood, adolescence, and then later on transformed friendships.
p.124-125
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| Painting above: Red Hill and White Shell (c.1938) by Georgia O'Keeffe |
[In response to a question on how to develop more dreamlike
and surreal/interesting dreams]
That depends on what you nourish yourself on. It depends on what books you read, what films you see, what paintings you see. My dreams have been influenced, say, by my love of Lippold’s Sun. Seeing things like that will nourish your dreams with poetic images, and if you want poetic dreams, you’ll have them.
p.136-7
This was why I took so much time to listen to the conversation of people and why the diary is so full of what they said. I was observant, but I didn’t have faith that I could do a work of my own until I finally decided that because I loved D.H. Lawrence I would write about him. This is something that every young person does. I found a model. I found someone whose work I wanted to develop further, because he was trying to write very often what woman felt [...] And then I wrote a book made out of dreams, but I was still very afraid of the formal work, of facing the world and saying: “I am a writer, I am a novelist.” So I was always hiding the diary; the diaries served the purpose of a retreat for a shy person who doesn’t want to come out into the world.
p.152
And this very idea of being watched by the world is what makes it necessary for us to turn to a secret occupation where we can really confront ourselves without the sense of the rest of the world watching. We have lived with too much consciousness of the world watching us. We think it is always a virtue, but it’s not a virtue when it prevents us from being truthful or when it prevents us from developing ourselves.
p.154-55
But our culture has a suspicion of what people do when they turn inward. The fear was probably that they would turn inward, as if inside a sea shell and never come out again.
p.156
It may seem to us, in terms of our conventional idea of loyalty, that it is disloyalty to look with complete honesty at a person we love. But I found that it is much less damaging than not being honest. Because the thoughts are there, and the impressions are there. They are only being repressed. So they come out in hostile form [...] It’s a different kind of loyalty. If you are true to how you feel, then you don’t have these hidden, destructive tendencies that we sometimes acquire by putting them away.
p.165
But I think for self-creation, in order really to visualize ourselves and create an identity and a personality, first there must be secrecy. I certainly felt that I had to do that alone, because otherwise either I would be taking my parents’ view of the world or that of the book I was reading. I felt I really had to have a separate place where I could create myself, and that there should not be any interference. So I would say, at the beginning, at the vulnerable stage, that I think it’s dangerous to share, it’s dangerous to write for another [because] at the beginning it’s dangerous because we still have an unformed concept of how we feel.
p.166
The process of creation is a criticism of yourself. There isn’t such a thing as growing without criticizing. You wouldn’t grow unless you really thought that yesterday’s self wasn’t good enough. It’s implied in the process. When you’re shedding something, it’s because you really think that you can grow further. The process of criticism is a part of it.
p.168
