Top 100 Anais Nin Quotes
#1. I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.
Anais Nin
#2. The softness of the summer day like an ermine paw.
Anais Nin
#3. I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.
Anais Nin
#4. I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.
Anais Nin
#5. To the woman with the least intelligence, there must come, at some time or other, the realization that housework is animal work and that there are other occupations in the world a thousand times more refined, more enriching, for which she is also suited and to which she has a right.
Anais Nin
#6. Why does a gesture, a walk, stir your blood? What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no drug and no alcohol to equal it.
Anais Nin
#7. Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.
Anais Nin
#8. 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.
Anais Nin
#9. I am made only for passion; it is the temperature of love that I cannot endure. I am afraid, and I think it is death- everything but passion seems like death to me. Only in fever do I feel life.
Anais Nin
#10. There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.
Anais Nin
#11. Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.
Anais Nin
#12. 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.
Anais Nin
#13. The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.
Anais Nin
#14. Now that I am moving, I am afraid. Where am I going?
Anais Nin
#15. Atrophy of feeling creates criminals.
Anais Nin
#16. We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks.
Anais Nin
#17. They courted the face on the screen, the face of translucence, the face of wax on which men found it possible to imprint the image of their fantasy.
Anais Nin
#18. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness.
Anais Nin
#19. We don't see things how they are, we see things the way we are.
Anais Nin
#20. I am most deeply concerned over a trend toward conformity, a growth of anti-intellectualism, which manifests itself in a sneering attitude toward education, science, and the arts. The tendency is to stifle mental freedom, which is the very basis of a democracy's life and growth.
Anais Nin
#21. Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.
Anais Nin
#22. Our psychological reality, which lies below the surface, frightens us because it endlessly surprises us and drives us in a direction which society's rules and organizations define as wrong or dangerous.
Anais Nin
#23. I don't hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you into me. I could stuff my ears and it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.
Anais Nin
#24. I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman
Anais Nin
#25. Confront all the angry thoughts, feelings, the jealousies and condemnations, to find their cause, seek the root of such feelings and then operate on that. Need of security and reassurance can cause criminal acts.
Anais Nin
#26. I have decided that if analysis is a hothouse, a hastening of wisdom and growth, nevertheless the life experience must be actually lived out and through, completely, in spite of it; everything that is lived out in the imagination is poison.
Anais Nin
#27. 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.
Anais Nin
#28. No rest for me anywhere. No rest from writing, awareness, insights, memories, fantasies, analogies, free associations. Writing becomes imperative for a surcharged head.
Anais Nin
#29. This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men's dreams.
Anais Nin
#30. 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
Anais Nin
#31. Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you.
Anais Nin
#32. 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.
Anais Nin
#33. He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself ... For him the only danger came from the microbes that attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which eats into the soul.
Anais Nin
#34. Men recognised her always: the same effulgent face, the same rust voice. And she and I, we recognised each other; I her face and she my legend.
Anais Nin
#35. Nothing seems true today except the death of the goldfish who used to make love at ninety kilometers an hour in the pool. The maid has given him a Christian burial. To the worms! To the worms!
Anais Nin
#36. I don't mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated
Anais Nin
#37. At first she beckoned and lured one into her world; then, she blurred the passageways, confused all the images, as if to elude detection.
Anais Nin
#38. The child who is uprooted begins to recognize that what he builds within himself is what will endure, what will withstand shattering experiences.
Anais Nin
#39. The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.
Anais Nin
#40. We do not see the world as it is. We see the word as we are.
Anais Nin
#41. That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe.
Anais Nin
#42. Nowhere is inhumanity more revealed than in hospitals.
Anais Nin
#43. To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school [of writing]. A hunger for the unknown and an aspiration toward beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial.
Anais Nin
#44. His body smelled like a precious-wood forest; his hair, like sandalwood, his skin, like cedar. It was as if he had always lived among trees and plants.
Anais Nin
#45. I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream.
Anais Nin
#46. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead.
Anais Nin
#47. He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.
Anais Nin
#48. She abandoned herself to his whim, thinking it was to be an orgy of eyes and hands only.
Anais Nin
#49. I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.
Anais Nin
#50. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.
Anais Nin
#51. As soon as I kiss him I know that I love him with a blind instinct beyond all reason, with all his defects.
Anais Nin
#52. When you're in my arms, I know you're mine. But your feet are so swift, so swift, they carry you as lightly as wings, I never know where, too fast, too fast away from me.
Anais Nin
#53. Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.
Anais Nin
#54. The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.
Anais Nin
#55. What can you give when there is no self, when you have no sensitivity, no receptivity, no warmth, nothing to contact others with?
Anais Nin
#57. You are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.
Anais Nin
#58. Though the passivity of woman's role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? [...] Do women act thus?
Anais Nin
#59. Fools compare... the wise enjoy.
Anais Nin
#60. A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.
Anais Nin
#61. I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.
Anais Nin
#62. The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment.
Anais Nin
#63. It is difficult to live with the pure. They do not condemn you; they forgive you. This forgiveness is more terrible than a judgment.
Anais Nin
#64. Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one ...
Anais Nin
#65. words carry colors and sounds into the flesh
Anais Nin
#66. The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements.
Anais Nin
#67. Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an artist.
Anais Nin
#68. A war regarded as inevitable or even probable, and therefore much prepared for, has a very good chance of eventually being fought.
Anais Nin
#69. To escape him she had run away to the end of the world. To be free of him she had run away to places where he never went.
Anais Nin
#70. I awoke at dawn, thrown up on a rock, the skeleton of a ship choked in its own sails.
Anais Nin
#71. We cannot cure the evils of politics with politics ...
Anais Nin
#72. The obstacle became his alibi for weakness.
Anais Nin
#74. 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.
Anais Nin
#75. The river of life divides into two branches: being and formulating.
Anais Nin
#76. It was while helping others to be free that I gained my own freedom.
Anais Nin
#77. We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in modern life. That is our tragedy. Once I wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only absolute act left to do, for what is most powerful in me is the craving for purity, greatness.
Anais Nin
#78. New York seems conducted by jazz, animated by it. It is essentially a city of rhythm.
Anais Nin
#79. 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.
Anais Nin
#80. 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.
Anais Nin
#81. I have this weird obsession about buying books and looking at them with a smile, even if I won't read them soon. At least they are mine now.
Anais Nin
#82. You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.
Anais Nin
#83. The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium.
Anais Nin
#84. Each one of us possesses in himself a separate and distinct city, a unique city, as we possess different aspects of the same person.
Anais Nin
#85. And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity...
Anais Nin
#86. I have no brakes on ... analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life.
Anais Nin
#87. That last afternoon in Henry's hotel room was for me like a white-hot furnace. Before, I had only white heat of the mind and of the imagination; now it is of the blood. Sacred completeness. I come out dazed in the mellow spring evening and I think, now I would not mind dying.
Anais Nin
#88. The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
Anais Nin
#89. the cape held within its folds something of what she imagined was a quality possessed exclusively by man: some dash, some audacity, some swagger of freedom denied to woman
Anais Nin
#90. Willingness to explore everything is a sign of strength. The weak ones have prejudices. Prejudices are a protection.
Anais Nin
#91. All I wanted was humor and wisdom.
Anais Nin
#92. Her presence had awakened in him a man suddenly whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in action.
Anais Nin
#93. I don't want you to taint that fragile coat of astonishing colors created by my illusions, which no painter has ever been able to reproduce. Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions give them?
Anais Nin
#94. There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned,
Anais Nin
#95. We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.
Anais Nin
#96. But the artist persists because he has the will to create, and this is the magic power which can transform and transfigure and transpose and which will ultimately be transmitted to others.
Anais Nin
#97. Was it not an act of love to impersonate the loved one?
Anais Nin
#98. People living deeply have no fear of death.
Anais Nin
#99. We see things as we are, not as they are...
Anais Nin
#100. We efface an hour by passionate love, without twists, without aftertaste. When it is finished, it is not finished, we lie still in each other's arms lulled by our love, by tenderness
sensuality in which the whole being can participate.
Anais Nin
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