Saturday, November 02, 2013

Anais Nin: "Ordinary Life Does Not Interest Me."


Anais Nin (Photo Credit: Irving Penn)
A Spy in the House of Love. First Edition, 1954.
Profound insights on creativity, intimacy and life from the great Anais Nin:

"You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this."
― Anais Nin,  A Spy in the House of Love (1954)

"I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry."
― Anais Nin, Diaries, August 22, 1936 Fire

"Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!"
― Anais Nin, Diaries, Oct. 21, 1934

"Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous."
― Anais Nin, Diaries, Winter, 1931-1932

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death."
― Anais Nin, Diary of Anaïs Nin , Volume One 1931-1934

"Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art."
― Anais Nin, February 1954 The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 5 (1947-1955), as quoted in Woman as Writer (1978) by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, p. 38

"The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness."
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5, as quoted in Moving to Antarctica: An Anthology of Women's Writing (1975) by Margaret Kaminski

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See Also

Richard Power's Primal Reality Quadrilogy Available Now from Amazon.com

Great Song: Life and Teachings of Joe Miller - Available Now Via Kindle (Amazon) and Nook (Barnes and Noble)