Angela Rosa Edelmira Nin known professionally as Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban American diarist, essayist, novelist and writer of short stories and erotica. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin was the daughter of composer Joaquín Nin and Rosa Culmell, a classically trained singer. Nin spent her early years in Spain and Cuba, about sixteen years in Paris, and the remaining half of her life in the United States, where she became an author.
Nin wrote journals prolifically from age eleven until her death. Her journals, many of which were published during her lifetime, detail her private thoughts and personal relationships. Her journals also describe her marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, in addition to her numerous affairs, including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller, both of whom profoundly influenced Nin and her writing. (via Wikipedia)
A few of her great quotes are listed below:
On Love:
Too late for changes, too late perhaps for explanations and ideological webs, but the love goes on, the love goes on, blind to laws and warnings and even to wisdom and to fears. And whatever that love is, perhaps an illusion of a new love, I want it, I can’t resist it, my whole being melts in one kiss, my knowledge melts, my fears melt, my blood dances, my legs open.
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, dies of illness and wounds; and dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
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.
Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
On Life:
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.
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
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.
On Happiness:
If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness.
On Knowledge:
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
Other Quotes:
People living deeply have no fear of death.
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.
The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.