Anais Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I can’t let you go now. I want to go places with you; obscure little places, just to be able to say: here I came with her.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“We have been poisoned by fairy tales.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The love of only one man or one woman is an enclosure.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality, so different from a man’s and for which man’s language was so inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Your strength is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Love men and women not for their strength but their softness, not for their fullness but their hunger, not for their plenty but their need.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for ‘artist’ or ‘art.’ Everyone is an artist.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Passion gives me moments of wholeness.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I have a prejudice against people with money. I have known so many, and none have escaped the corruption of power. In this I am a purist. I love people motivated by love and not by power. If you have money and power, and are motivated by love, you give it all away.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The one who travels like a lover searching for a new passion is suddenly blessed with new eyes, new ears, new senses.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“What I cannot love, I overlook.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I’m awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?” ~ Anaïs Nin

“If you are terribly truthful, the ground will always move from under you, and you will have to shift with the constantly shifting truth.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“My diary seems to keep me whole.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The secret of life was Breath. That was what I always wanted my words to do, to Breathe.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one’s self from enslavement by the earth.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“People living deeply have no fear of death.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I want to do things so wild with you that I don’t know how to say them.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“In chaos, there is fertility.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Each friend represents a world in us.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“When you possess light within, you see it externally.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Adolescence is like cactus.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Good things happen to those who hustle.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Coming near him like a ballet dancer she took a leap towards him, and he, frightened by her vehemence, and fearing that she would crash against him, instinctively became absolutely rigid, and she felt herself embracing a statue.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul – you create suffering.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Living never wore one so much as the effort not to live.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I never liked the language of Henry Miller. I don’t think pornography has added to our sensual life.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Travel is seeking the lost paradise. It is the supreme illusion of love.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Is devotion to others a cover for the hungers and the needs of the self, of which one is ashamed? I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not virtue. It was a disguise.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.” ~ Anaïs Nin

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

“To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one’s mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Memory is a great betrayer.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.” ~ Anaïs Nin

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

“I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I don’t wish power, only art -art and passion.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.” ~ Anaïs Nin

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

“We are cruel when someone refuses to play the role in which we have cast him. We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You will always be a part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we shared, at some moment, the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Don’t let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“You live out the confusions until they become clear.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“You don’t find love, it finds you. It’s got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what’s written in the stars.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I am a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“We see things the way we are, not the way they are.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“You cannot save people. You can only love them.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“If a person continues to see only giants, it means he is still seeing the world through the eyes of a child. I have a feeling that man’s fear of woman comes from having first seen her as the mother, creator of men.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of himself that he does not see himself in the mirror.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Jazz is the music of the body.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“You fall in love with people’s minds.” ~ 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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I write emotional algebra.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“If you can’t create, you destroy.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Your eyes make me shy.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Dreams are necessary to life.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art – we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Things aren’t the way they are, they’re the way you are.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“We don’t have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I love my mystery, I love the abstract world I live in, the delicate, profound, vague, obscure, voluptuously, wordless sensations I experience.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I love your silences, they are like mine.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Ordinary life does not interest me.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Write. Write until it stops hurting.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“I don’t tell the truth any more to those who can’t make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The obstacle became his alibi for weakness.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“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.” ~ Anaïs Nin

“The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.” ~ Anaïs Nin

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