Hello everyone!
I've begun this absolutely amazing novel, The Diary of Anais Nin: 1931-1934. It's honestly one of the best books I've ever opened, and I wanted to share a few of my favorite quotes with you. Enjoy!
"Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension."
"His notes: black stockings, overfull bags, missing buttons, hair always falling down or about to topple down, a strand always falling over the eye, hasty dressing, mobility, no repose… At times she has holes in her stockings, wears unwashed jeans, uses safety pins to hold everything together. At other times she rushes to buy gloves, perfume. But all the time her eyes are carefully made-up, like the eyes on Egyptian frescos. ‘She demands illusion as other women demand jewels.’ …From his notes for a future novel: June brings to the studio a treasure house of curios, paintings, statues, with vague stories as to how they had been acquired. Just recently I found that she had obtained a statue from Zadkine saying she would sell it and, of course, never did. She makes use of the soft part of the bread for a napkin. She falls asleep at times with her shoes on, on unmade beds. When a little money comes in, June buys delicacies, strawberries in the winter, caviar and bath salts."
"He has an eagerness to catch everything without make-up, without embellishment, women before they comb their hair, waiters before they don artificial smiles with their artificial bow ties."
"So delicacy and violence are about to meet and challenge each other. The image this brings to my mind is an alchemist workshop. Beautiful crystal bottles communicating with each other by a system of fragile crystal canals. These transparent bottles show nothing but jeweled, colorful liquids or clouded water or smoke, giving to the external eye an abstract aesthetic pleasure. The consciousness of danger, fatal mixtures, is known only to the chemist. I feel like a well-appointed laboratory of the soul—myself, my home, my life—in which none of the vitality fecund or destructive, explosive experiments has yet begun. I like the shape of the bottles, the colors of the chemicals. I collect bottles, and the more they look like alchemist bottles, the more I like them for their eloquent forms."
"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… 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."
xoxo, Maddie.
