“No moment of charm without long roots in the past, no moment of charm is born on bare soil, a careless accident of beauty, but is the sum of great sorrows, growths, and efforts.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“I am sure you would not understand if I told you my father is delightfully clear and selfish, tender and lying, formal and incurable. He exhausts all the loves given to him. If I did not leave his house at night to warm myself in Rango's burning hands I would die at my task, arid and barren, sapless, while my father monologues about his past, and I yawn yawn yawn...”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“Ali Baba protects the lovers! Gives them the luck of bandits, and no guilt, for love fills certain people and expands them beyond all laws; there is no time, no place for regrets, hesitations, cowardices. Love runs free and reckless, and all the gentle trickeries perpetrated to protect others from its burns-those who are not the lovers but who might be the victims of this love's expansion.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“Out of worship and out of love he would let no one light the stove for her either, as if he would be the warmth and the fire to dry and warm her feet.”
“When you focus on your vision, you stand a better chance to flourish and walk in victory.”
Source: A Manual for Victory
“With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others