54 quotes
To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.
Diary entries (1914)
For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds...
Diary entries (1914)
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.
Diary entries (1914)
Passion gives me moments of wholeness.
Diary entries (1914)
The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.
Diary entries (1914)
I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth.
Diary entries (1914)
He was insane with anger. Or is all insanity anger?
Diary entries (1914)
There will never be darkness because in both of us there's always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection has been a still experience...
Diary entries (1914)
I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.
Diary entries (1914)
At a lecture I am asked to pronounce my name three times. I try to be slow and emphatic, "Anaïs — Anaïs — Anaïs. You just say "Anna" and then add "ees," with the accent on the "ees."
Diary entries (1914)
We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it.
Diary entries (1914)
Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.
Diary entries (1914)
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
Diary entries (1914)
We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.
Diary entries (1914)