Quotes About Anais Nin

#1. I knew Anais Nin, who called me after I had been away for a few years. She was seeking help because at that time no one would give her a decent review. She was made fun of.

Marguerite Young

#2. We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are. Anais Nin

Debbie Hampton

#3. The humiliations and defeats,
given with a primitive honesty,
end not in frustration, despair or futility,
but in hunger, an ecstatic devouring hunger - for more life.
- Anais Nin

Anais Nin

#4. Life shrinks and expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anais Nin

Mark Manson

#5. I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again. - Anais Nin

Amber L. Johnson

#6. We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

Sue Monk Kidd

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

Anais Nin

#8. This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

Anais Nin

#9. We must protect the minority writers because they are the research workers of literature. They keep it alive. It has been fashionable of late to seek out and force such writers into more popular channels, to the detriment of both writer and an unprepared public.

Anais Nin

#10. I never liked the language of Henry Miller. I don't think pornography has added to our sensual life.

Anais Nin

#11. I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers.

Anais Nin

#12. Dreams are essential to life.

Anais Nin

#13. 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

Anais Nin

#14. My diary seems to keep me whole.

Anais Nin

#15. The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.

Anais Nin

#16. When I am most deeply rooted, I feel the wildest desire to uproot myself.

Anais Nin

#17. For the first time, in Golconda, she had practiced Larry's choice of withdrawing if the people were not of quality. Of preferring solitude to the effort of pretending he was interested in them.

Anais Nin

#18. There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection.

Anais Nin

#19. The softness of the summer day like an ermine paw.

Anais Nin

#20. I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.

Anais Nin

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

Anais Nin

#22. [Y]ou 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.

Anais Nin

#23. I believe the lasting revolution comes from deep changes in ourselves which influence our collective life.

Anais Nin

#24. His theatre was the clouds, where no spectacle repeated itself. On land he was a foreigner. Land for him was stasis, and it pulled him into immobility, which was his image of death.
- ,

Anais Nin

#25. Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it.

Anais Nin

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. Love reduces the complexity of living. It amazes me that when Henry walks towards the cafe table where I wait for him, or opens the gate to our house, the sight of him is sufficient to exult me. No letter from anyone, even in praise of my book, can stir me as much as a note from him.

Anais Nin

#29. 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.

Anais Nin

#30. I did not feel drawn to huxley. He was beautiful physically but again without vibrations or sensory antennae ... and I had a painful impression of a psychic blindness. With all his science and knowledge, in the mystic world he blundered.

Anais Nin

#31. We're journeying constantly, but there is always a machine and books, and your body is always close to me and the look in your eyes never changes. People are saying we will be miserable, we will regret, but we are happy, we are laughing always, we are singing. We are talking Spanish and French and

Anais Nin

#32. At sixteen, Sabina took moon baths, first of all, because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous.

Anais Nin

#33. [On Paris:] A city never entirely known, yet which gives you the feeling of intimacy, of possessing it intimately.

Anais Nin

#34. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have shared my kingdom with you.

Anais Nin

#35. A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.

Anais Nin

#36. Now the evening is beginning and I will discover a human being to court or to be courted by, an adventure with caprice and desire, and while gambling I might find love.

Anais Nin

#37. Big Business and Politics are twins, they are the monsters who kill everything, corrupt everything.

Anais Nin

#38. What can I say Rango? What can I do to prove to you that I belong to you?

Anais Nin

#39. It was this that frightened me
the sense that behind the grande amoureuse lay concealed a little bourgeoise who wanted security in love.

Anais Nin

#40. 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.

Anais Nin

#41. We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.

Anais Nin

#42. Golconda remained a city where the wind was like velvet, where the sun was made of radium, and the sea as warm as a mother's womb.

Anais Nin

#43. Analysis does not take into account the creative products of neurotic desires.

Anais Nin

#44. She walked in the shadow of Rango with a great feeling of being taken out of herself, of having no knowledge of what was happening to her, merely a pervading sense of flow.

Anais Nin

#45. 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

#46. I will cover the walls with words. It will be la chambre des mots.

Anais Nin

#47. The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.

Anais Nin

#48. Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.

Anais Nin

#49. Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of himself that he does not see himself in the mirror.

Anais Nin

#50. My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea, and my eyes are the color of water.

Anais Nin

#51. I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.

Anais Nin

#52. 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

#53. The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or a woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.

Anais Nin

#54. The whole world is based on fear, even behind the jealousy of the day before lay dear. Fear of being alone, fear of being abandoned, fear of life, fear of being trapped in tragedy, fear of the animal in us, fear of one's hatred, of committing a crime, fear of cancer, of syphilis, of starvation.

Anais Nin

#55. I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all ...

Anais Nin

#56. And the very folds of the curtains contained secrets and sighs.

Anais Nin

#57. Lillian did not know then that the one who believes he can pay this early debt meets a bottomless well. Because the first denial has set off a fatality of revenge which no amount of giving can placate.

Anais Nin

#58. Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine.

Anais Nin

#59. I'm sick of my own romanticism!

Anais Nin

#60. In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action.

Anais Nin

#61. When I cannot bear outer pressures anymore, I begin to put order in my belongings ... As if unable to organize and control my life, I seek to exert this on the world of objects.

Anais Nin

#62. The shell is America's most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early.

Anais Nin

#63. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

Anais Nin

#64. We see things the way we are, not the way they are.

Anais Nin

#65. 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.

Anais Nin

#66. Every individual is representative of the whole ... and should be intimately understood, and this would give a far greater understanding of mass movements and sociology.

Anais Nin

#67. But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted.

Anais Nin

#68. Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.

Anais Nin

#69. You loved a man who treated you like absinthe, half poison and half god.

Anais Nin

#70. Will I really be able to accept my mental loneliness?

Anais Nin

#71. Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home.

Anais Nin

#72. Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

Anais Nin

#73. I would tell him how he almost made us lose interest in passion by his obsession with the gestures empty of their emotions, and how we reviled him, because he almost caused us to take vows of chastity, because what he wanted us to exclude was our own aphrodisiac - poetry.

Anais Nin

#74. I am quite wiling to confide entirely in human being, except that at some moment or another human beings get preoccupied, moody, busy, inattentive, and there come an end to the interest, and this never happens in a journal!

Anais Nin

#75. 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

#76. Please understand I am in full rebellion against my own mind, that when I live, I live by impulse, by emotion, by white heat.

Anais Nin

#77. 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

#78. The living out in excess kills the imagination and the intensity,

Anais Nin

#79. When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He's a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me.

Anais Nin

#80. A long time ago," said Michael, "I decided never to fall in love again. I have made of desire an anonymous activity." "But not to feel ... not to love ... is like dying within life, Michael.

Anais Nin

#81. When I hear of people who weary of each other, I believe it is because they have sought virtues in themselves alone, attractions of physical beauty. Have they based their love on each other's thoughts? Who can weary of thoughts which change every day?

Anais Nin

#82. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

Anais Nin

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

Anais Nin

#84. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence.

Anais Nin

#85. I either eat too much or starve myself. Sleep for 14 hours or have insomniac nights. Fall in love very hard or hate passionately. I don't know what grey is. I never did.

Anais Nin

#86. I feel a little like the moon who took possession of you for a moment and then returned your soul to you. You should not love me. One ought not to love the moon. If you come too near me, I will hurt you.

Anais Nin

#87. I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.

Anais Nin

#88. 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

#89. Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to this poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, 'Climb!

Anais Nin

#90. 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.

Anais Nin

#91. He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away.

Anais Nin

#92. Whereas by desiring someone who would not desire her, she could allow this fire to burn and feel: how alive I am! I am capable of desire.

Anais Nin

#93. One discovers that destiny can be diverted, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. Once the deforming mirror has been smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness. There is a possibility of joy.

Anais Nin

#94. They smiled at each other. His smile, even at night was dazzling; hers, too. They could scarcely distinguish anything but the brilliant smiles and the outlines of their perfect bodies.

Anais Nin

#95. He observed confusion and chaos, which I call living by one's emotions instead of one's mind.

Anais Nin

#96. I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique.

Anais Nin

#97. The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.

Anais Nin

#98. Now that I am moving, I am afraid. Where am I going?

Anais Nin

#99. I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.

Anais Nin

#100. Balance is not to be sought by association with others; it must exist within one's self.

Anais Nin