Authors — Quotes

Anaïs Nin Quotes: 53

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
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.
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 naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
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 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
I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.
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.
Incest: From a Journal of Love
Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
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.
The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.
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.
People living deeply have no fear of death.
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work.
Henry And June
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
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.
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.
Henry & June
Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving.
Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
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.
Dreams are necessary to life.
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
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.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.
What I cannot love, I overlook.
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.
Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.
Delta of Venus
I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.
He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.
Delta of Venus
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
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat.
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.
Journals Of Anais Nin Volume 3
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947
This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.
I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.
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.
I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.
House of Incest
I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle.
Living never wore one so much as the effort not to live.
I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable, which is the lost faith.
For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue — that I had to do the job myself.
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.
A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934