Anaïs Nin Quotes

Fucking is an art. The mere fact of introducing the cock in the cunt and moving it in and out until the ejaculation of spunk is not art. True, it is fucking, but the difference between that way of doing it and the way it should be done, is like the difference between a child's first drawing and a picture by the world's greatest painter.

~ Anaïs Nin

Even when they did not look at each other or speak to each other, he could feel a powerful current between them.

~ Anaïs Nin

He never treated her as a wife. He wooed her over and over again, with presents, flowers, new pleasures.

~ Anaïs Nin

I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.

~ Anaïs Nin

Every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room.

~ Anaïs Nin

When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts. Naked now, he lay his full length over her. She enjoyed his weight on her, enjoyed being crushed under his body. She wanted him soldered to her, from mouth to feet. Shivers passed through her body.

~ Anaïs Nin

We are dancing on our irony as upon the top of glowing sparks.

~ Anaïs Nin

Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body’s breath, and the strings’ wails and moans are echoes of the body’s music. It is the body’s vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.

~ Anaïs Nin

The relief of opening one's hand and letting go was immense. But soon after, I tightened again. A desire for revenge, a strange revenge.

~ Anaïs Nin

Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one...

~ Anaïs Nin

There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.

~ 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

The origin of illness may be in the past, but the virulent crisis must be dynamically tackled. I believe in attacking the core of the illness, through its present symptoms, quickly, directly. The past is a labyrinth. One does not have to step into it and move step by step through every turn and twist. The past reveals itself instantly, in today’s fever or abscess of the soul.

~ 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

There are women’s voices that sound like poetic, unearthly echoes. Then they change. The eyes change. I believe that all these legends about people changing into animals at night – like the stories of the werewolf, for instance – were invented by men who saw women transformed at night – from idealized, worshipful creatures into animals and thought that they were possessed.

~ Anaïs Nin

We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it... We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely.

~ Anaïs Nin

I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.

~ Anaïs Nin

There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.

~ Anaïs Nin

We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.

~ Anaïs Nin

I feel a little like the moon who took possession of you for a moment and then returned your soul to you. You should not love me. One ought not to love the moon. If you come too near me, I will hurt you.

~ Anaïs Nin

In chaos, there is fertility.

~ Anaïs Nin

We are punctual, a stressed, marked characteristic. We need order around us, in the house, in the life, although we live by irresistible impulses, as if the order in the closets, in our papers, in our books, in our photographs, in our souvenirs, in our clothes could preserve us from chaos in our feelings, loves, in our work. Indifference to food, sobriety; but this, we admit, is the part of the war against a threatening fragility.

~ Anaïs Nin

What you call your lies are fiction and myths. The art of creating a disguise can be as beautiful as the creation of a painting… I created a woman for my artist life, bold, gay, courageous, generous, fearless; and another to please my father, a clear-sighted woman with a love of beauty, harmony, and self-discipline, critical and selective; and still another who lives in chaos, embraces the weak and the stumbling and the confused.

~ Anaïs Nin

She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness...A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there.

~ Anaïs Nin

When you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive

~ 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

Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.

~ 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

Later he´ll be drunk in extremis and will only be able to speak the esperanto of alcoholics, which is a language full of stutterings from the geological layers of our animal ancestors

~ 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

What is the greatest need of human beings? What is it they seek from me always? Intimacy. I listen with all my being, I am completely interested. I seek momentarily a full communion of eyes, feelings, thoughts.

~ Anaïs Nin

People living deeply have no fear of death.

~ Anaïs Nin

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

~ 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

One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life and that leap is the most difficult to make-to part with one's faith one's love when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.

~ Anaïs Nin

Violence is a symptom of impotence.

~ 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

When one is pretending the entire body revolts.

~ Anaïs Nin

Beware of allowing a tactless word rebuttal a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.

~ 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