Anaïs Nin Quotes

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

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

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

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.

~ Anaïs Nin

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.

~ Anaïs Nin

What I cannot love, I overlook.

~ Anaïs Nin

Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

~ Anaïs Nin

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.

~ Anaïs Nin

I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.

~ Anaïs Nin

And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. 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.What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.

~ 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.

~ Anaïs Nin

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

~ Anaïs Nin

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.

~ 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

Dreams are necessary to life.

~ Anaïs Nin

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.

~ Anaïs Nin

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

~ Anaïs Nin

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

~ Anaïs Nin

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

~ 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

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.

~ Anaïs Nin

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.

~ 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

We are more severe judges of our own acts... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.

~ Anaïs Nin

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.

~ 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

He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.

~ Anaïs Nin

There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.

~ Anaïs Nin

But my faith seems naive, at least today. Maybe tomorrow I can believe again.

~ Anaïs Nin

I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

~ Anaïs Nin

A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.

~ Anaïs Nin

At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness.

~ 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

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

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

~ Anaïs Nin

I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.

~ Anaïs Nin

The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated dose of life. I said, almost indignantly, That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments. You, in your books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with excitement that I expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated.Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying to live up to Dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm.

~ Anaïs Nin

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

~ Anaïs Nin

The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.

~ Anaïs Nin