Anaïs Nin Quotes
Most popular Anaïs Nin Quotes
Adolescence is like cactus.
Dreams are necessary to life.
Jazz is the music of the body.
Hollywood is a mirage factory.
What I cannot love, I overlook.
People living deeply have no fear of death.
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
When one is pretending the entire body revolts.
Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage.
You live out the confusions until they become clear.
Guilt is the one burden human beings can't bear alone.
Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.
What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures.
Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge.
The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves.
Self-destructive patterns cause as much suffering as outer catastrophes.
I must be a mermaid. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.
Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.
Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.
There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
I know perfectly well the cynic is a coward. He foresees all barrenness so that barrenness can never surprise him.
I take pleasure in my "transformations." I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.
The dream was always running ahead of one. To catch up, to live for a moment in union with it, that was the miracle.
In every relationship, sooner or later, there is a court scene. Accusations, counter-accusations, a trial, a verdict.
There is an analogy between the bombardment of the atom and the bombardment of the personality by the method of analysis.
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.
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the action stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
Throw your dream into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, or a new country.
The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world, and if this lens is not clear of distortions, we cannot perceive others.
You carry 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.
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.
The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts.
A trite word is an overused word which has lost its identity like an old coat in a second-hand shop. The familiar grows dull and we no longer see, hear, or taste it.
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.
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.
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.
There are 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, cellular, like a laborious mosaic.
I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.... I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and re-create myself when destroyed by living.
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.
Electric flesh arrows, a second wave of pleasure falls over the first, a third which touches every nerve end, and now the third like an electric current 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.
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.
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 illnesses and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never a natural death. Every lover should be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love.
