Quote with 30 notes
Greyness is no ordinary greyness, but a vast lead roof which covers the world like the lid of a soup pan. The breath of human beings is like the steam of a laundry house. The smoke of cigarettes is like a rain of ashes from Vesuvius. The lights taste of sulphur, and each face stares at you with the immensity of its defects. The smallness of a room is like that of an iron cage in which one can neither sit nor lie down. The largeness of other rooms is like a mortal danger always suspended above you, awaiting the moment of your joy to fall. Laughter and tears are not separate experiences, with intervals of rest: they rush out together and it is like walking with a sword between your legs. Rain does not wet your hair but drips in the cells of the brain with the obstinacy of a leak. Snow does not freeze the hands, but like ether distends the lungs until they burst. All the ships are sinking with fire in their bowels, and there are fires hissing in the cellars of every house. The loved one’s whitest flesh is what the broken glass will cut and the wheel crush. The long howls in the night are howls of death. Night is the collaborator of torturers. Day is the light on harrowing discoveries. If a dog barks it is the man who loves wide gashes leaping in through the window. Laughter precedes hysteria. I am waiting for the heavy fall and the foam at the mouth.
Quote with 319 notes
Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.
Quote with 16 notes
I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness. It was this seeing too much, this seeing of a tragedy in the quiver of an eyelid, constructing a crime in the next room, the men and women who had loved before me on the same hotel bed.
I carry white sponges of knowledge on strings of nerves.
As I move within my book I am cut by pointed glass and broken bottles in which there is still the odor of sperm and perfume.
More pages added to the book but pageslike a prisoner’s walking back and forth over the space alotted him. What is it alotted me to say?
Quote with 434 notes
What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.
Photoset with 64 notes
Collages by Val Telberg for Anaïs Nin’s House of Incest
“In the house of incest there was a room which could not be found, a room without a window, the fortress of their love, a room without a window where the mind and blood coalesced in a union without orgasm and rootless like those of fishes. The promiscuity of glances, of phrases, like sparks marryng in space. The collision between their resemblances, shedding the odor of tamarisk and sand, of rotted shells and dying sea-weeds, their love like the ink of squids, a banquet of poisons.”
Quote with 57 notes
In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.
Quote reblogged from waxwings with 245 notes
She only believed in intimacy and proximity, in confessions born in the darkness of a bedroom, in quarrels born of alcohol, in communions born of exhausting walks through the city. She only believed in those words which came like the confessions of criminals after long exposure to hunger, to intense lights, to cross-questioning, to violent tearing away of masks.
Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 1, 1931-1934.
(via undare)
Photo reblogged from Gacougnol with 81 notes
House of Incest, Anaïs Nin
Photomontage by Val Telberg
Source: mille
Photo reblogged from unbearable vision with 272 notes
unbearablevision, experimentalcinema:
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954)
Source: praise-of-folly
Quote reblogged from Poe's Mistress with 181 notes
All that is sacred and taboo in our world is meaningless.
Anaïs Nin, from preface to Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer
(via frenchtwist)
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