Henry And June: From "A Journal Of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary Of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932 Quotes
"Sensuality is a secret power in my body," I said to Eduardo. "Someday it will show, healthy and ample. Wait a while."
"The discipline of daily writing without readers or censorship gave Anaïs, over the years, an ability to describe her emotions of the moment."
"I cannot even talk of my wish to go to a cabaret where we could dance with professional dancers."
"Psychology, being scientific thinking, has become a successful bridge between his banking and my writing."
"I offered him all kinds of solutions: one, to let me go away to Zurich to study and give him temporary freedom."
"Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions for pleasure."
"I've met Henry Miller. He came to lunch with Richard Osborn, a lawyer I had to consult on the contract for my D. H. Lawrence book."
"He is like a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me."
"I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself."
"There is in me something untouched, unstirred, which commands me. That will have to be moved if I am to move wholly."
"June. At night I dreamed of her, as if she were very small, very frail, and I loved her."
"I hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am more preoccupied with loving."
"I would live her life except for my compassion and my conscience."
"Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are."
"I sit down before a letter or my journal with a desire for honesty, but perhaps in the end I am the biggest liar of them all."
"By giving myself I learn to love Hugo more. By living as I do I am preserving our love from bitterness and death."
"I guess, Henry, that you are suffering from the effort at complete revelations about yourself and June, inexorable frankness but painfully obtained."
"The truth is that this is the only way I can live: in two directions. I need two lives. I am two beings."
"What eludes me forever is the reality of being a man."
"Our love lives, because I live. I sustain and feed it. I am loyal to it, in my own way, which cannot be his way."
"I want to possess June. I identify myself with the men who can penetrate her."
"The important thing is the response to life."
"One cannot escape from one's own nature, although Henry said yesterday, 'There are flaws in your goodness.' Flaws. What a relief. Fissures. I may escape through them."
"One does not get healed just by living and loving, or I would be healed."
"Hugo has gone away on a trip, and he kissed me so desperately and sorrowfully."
"I have run away. My pajamas, comb, powder, perfume are in Henry's room. I find a Henry so utterly profound that I am dazed."
"Henry says, 'If Lawrence had lived...' Yes, I know the end of the sentence. I would have loved him."
"Eduardo said there is no pattern to Henry's writing or living. Exactly. If there were, he would be an analyst."
"Henry and I are waiting for the train on a high platform. The rain has washed the trees."
"I think he loves me with tenderness, with sentimentality. It is June who inspires the passions."
"Now alone in Louveciennes, I still feel the imprint of his body asleep against mine."
"Late in the night he tells me about a book I have not read, Arthur Machen's Hill of Dreams."
"Today I carried my mood to Henry, or what I could hold of it, for it seemed to me that it overflowed like lava."
"One does not meet the match to one's state of being, one's phase, one's mood, never."
"What Henry is tired of, I am hungry for, with a brand-new, fresh, vigorous hunger."
"An hour with Henry. He says, 'Anaïs, you overwhelm me. You arouse the strangest sensations.'"
"I can only think for the moment of his humiliation, his fears."
"Henry, my love, I don't want to hear any more about angels, souls, love, no more profundities."
"I feel the need of telling him I love him because I do not believe it."
"I stood before Henry with the submissiveness of a Latin woman, ready to be overwhelmed."
"I thought bitterly of June's magnificent willfulness, initiative, tyranny."
"It isn't strong women who make men weak, but weak men who make women overstrong."
"All the way home the poison spreads. I understand now how to play for a moment with those feelings I have held too sacred."
"Henry is precious to me, as he is. I melt when I see his frayed suit."
"Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my make-up, it will all work the same way."
"I failed to go to my last appointment with Allendy. I was beginning to depend on him, to be grateful to him."
"I mailed my surrealistic piece to Henry, adding, 'Things I forgot to tell you: That I love you, and that when I awake in the morning I use my intelligence to discover more ways of appreciating you.'"
"Despite all this I risked my marriage and happiness to sleep with Henry's letter under my pillow, with my hand on it."
"The emotion of duplicity releases an insidious poison."
"If this is your real self, the one you are asserting, I say it is a very hard self."
"I have been sweetly asleep for a few centuries, and I am erupting without warning."
"When all is right between us I can bear my life."
"I lie back and just love him, and I get such love from him as would justify my whole existence."
"I feel that I have loved the most remarkable man of our age."
"Human beings cannot bear the knowledge of the future."
"Memories alone hold Hugo and me together; and my journal preserves them."
"I see Allendy on Thursday. I am very keen on this meeting."
"I find that I do not know what to believe, that I have not decided yet whether analysis simplifies and undramatizes our existence."
"I love the groove in which my love for Henry has been running."
"What tempts me strongly is to face June with Henry, to let her torture us both, to love her, to win her love and Henry's."
"I am terribly in love with Henry, so why doesn't restlessness, fever, curiosity become attenuated?"
"I feel protective about both Henry and June. I feed them, work for them, sacrifice for them."
"I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe."