The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume 2 1934-1939

Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.

Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once.

I feel that from the very beginning life played a terrible conjurer’s trick on me. I lost faith in it. It seems to me that every moment now it is playing tricks on me. So that when I hear love I am not sure it is love, and when I hear gaiety I am not sure it is gaiety, and when I have eaten and loved and I am all warm from wine, I am not sure it is either love or food or wine, but a strange trick being played on me, an illusion, slippery and baffling and malicious, and a magician hangs behind me watching the ecstasy I feel at the things which happen so that I know deep down it is all fluid and escaping and may vanish at any moment. Don’t forget to write me a letter and tell me I was here, and I saw you, and loved you, and ate with you. It is all so evanescent and I love it so much, I love it as you love the change in the days.

For I am the kind of dangerous dreamer who executes all his reveries, wishes, words, promises, plans. The wildest and the lightest. A wish for me is not a game: it's a creation.

In Peru," said Gonzalo, "they cure madness by placing the madman next to a flowing river. The water flows, he throws stones into it, his feelings begin to flow again, and he is cured.

Patients weep when they discover they are their own victimizers and not the victim of others. They weep when they discover they are responsible for their own suffering.

Rebellions of all kinds attract to their activities weaklings who rebel because they cannot master, destroy because they cannot create.

He says: 'The capitalistic world killed the artist in me.' He sees as coming from outside all that comes from inside. I know the artist in him must have been very weak to be defeated by this obstacle at all. Limitations, restrictions, defeats, come from within. I am fully responsible for my own restrictions.

Men think they live and die for ideas. What a divine joke. They live and die for emotional, personal errors, just as women do.