Anais Nin Quotations

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. 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.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become a 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...I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book(Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom(when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this(or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.

I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it.

Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy.

We have been poisoned by fairy tales.

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.

I am a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough.

The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery. Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream.

Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul—you create suffering.

You cannot save people. You can only love them.

Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.

What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.

When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.

When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness.

Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.

The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.

I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.

I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts. Naked now, he lay his full length over her. She enjoyed his weight on her, enjoyed being crushed under his body. She wanted him soldered to her, from mouth to feet. Shivers passed through her body.

I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.

The secret of life was Breath. That was what I always wanted my words to do, to Breathe.

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

You live out the confusions until they become clear.

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.

For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love.

We are never trapped unless we choose to be.

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.

I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits

We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.

Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.

Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.

Life is a process of becoming. A combination of states we have to go through.

I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life.

She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.

You don't find love, it finds you. It's got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what's written in the stars.

When you possess light within, you see it externally.

With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness... something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame, annihilate him, with a pleasure never known before.

We. . .write to heighten our own awareness of life. . .We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. . We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it...to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. . .to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. . .When I don't write I feel my world shrinking. I feel I lose my fire, my color.

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.

I'm awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced.

What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. 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 up of layers, cells, constellations.

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.

The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.

The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.

No one was ever born without that light or flame of life. Some event, some person stifles or drowns it altogether. I was always tempted to resuscitate such men by my own joyousness or luminosity.When I break glasses in a night club, as the Russians do, when my unconscious breaks out in wild rebellions, it is against life which has crippled these idealistic, romantic men. I respect these men, cold, pure, faithful, devoted, moral, delicate, sensitive, and unequal to life, more than I respect the tough-minded ones who return three blows to one received, who kill those who hurt them.

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

All of my creation is an effort to weave a web of connection with the world: I am always weaving it because it was once broken.

I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ

"We see the world as 'we' are, not as 'it' is; because it is the "I" behind the 'eye' that does the seeing."

I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.

The obstacle became his alibi for weakness.

Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Expressing feelings is linked directly with creation... In this ability to tap the sources of feeling and imagination lies the secret of abundance.