Anais Nin Quotes (68 Quotes)

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Dreams are necessary to life.

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.

We have been poisoned by fairy tales.

Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key'

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.

Good things happen to those who hustle.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic -- in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

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.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.

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

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

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

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.

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

From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. 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.

Electric flesh-arrows... traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.

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

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

There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together

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

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

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

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

Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.

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

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.

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