Samirhenryanthonymichael

“Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932

“The need of language at this moment, for woman to write well, to express herself, is almost as important as the actual evolution of her growth. The Diary shows this, that the more I wrote, the clearer my thinking was, that the more I expressed myself, the more I was able then to express to the men or the artists around me what I felt or where I stood. It’s a great involvement with language, and the language in the first Diary is not as developed as it is in the second, or in the third. And it was finally by writing that I taught myself to talk with others. So I can’t stress enough for woman at this moment the need for articulateness, the need to care about language; because again the thing that can create misunderstandings and alienation and estrangement is the inability to speak, the inability to write. We need you to write, we need you to speak, we need this revelation of woman who is not only trying to be revealed to herself but needs to be revealed to others. I owe to writing everything. I owe to it the facts that I can sit here and talk with you. I know you don’t believe that, but I didn’t talk at all. And an aunt came one time and said to my mother: ‘I’m awfully sorry, but you have a subnormal child.’ When I was thirty I listened always to other people, and I never said a word. I was really mute. So I taught myself to talk, and I owe to writing the fact that we can talk together now. To me there is no question about it, there is no doubt of its meaning to our life.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Woman Speaks: The Lectures, Seminars and Interviews of Anaïs Nin

“What does it mean that you have not written me?... Am I a dream to you, am I not real and warm for you? What new loves, new ecstasies, new impulses move you now?”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1932

“There are a great many times we are passive in the face of destiny, forgetting that we really are able to be the captains of our destiny. We are taught a kind of passivity; the culture has taught us that a certain passivity is a feminine quality. So the day that I was told by Otto Rank that I was responsible for the failures, the defeats that had happened to me, and that it was in my power to conquer them, that day was a very exhilarating day. Because if you’re told that you’re responsible that means that you an do something about it. Whereas the people who say society is responsible, or some of the feminist women who say man is responsible, can only complain. You see if you put the blame on another, there is nothing you can do. I preferred to take the blame, because that also means that one can act, and it’s such a relief from passivity, from being the victim.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Woman Speaks: The Lectures, Seminars and Interviews of Anaïs Nin