Anais Nin

I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.

— Anais Nin

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

— Anais Nin

Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.

— Anais Nin

No one but a woman in love ever sees the maximum of men's greatness .

— Anais Nin

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. 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.

— Anais Nin

Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!

— Anais 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.

— Anais 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 of layers, cells, constellations.

— Anais Nin

In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth.

— Anais Nin

Everything but happiness is neurosis.

— Anais Nin

Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

— Anais Nin

No desire of the body, but for what lies in there, what lies in the flesh, the world, the thought, the creation, the illumination.

— Anais Nin

To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.

— Anais Nin

I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique.

— Anais Nin

I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.

— Anais Nin

Ecstasy is the moment of exaltation from wholeness!

— Anais Nin

Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.

— Anais 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.

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. 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.

— Anais Nin

One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed. But paradoxically, we create fiction out of human concern for the victims of the revelations. This concern is at the root of literature.

— Anais Nin

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.

— Anais Nin

I would say that compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

— Anais Nin

At a lecture I am asked to pronounce my name three times. I try to be slow and emphatic, "Anaïs — Anaïs — Anaïs. You just say "Anna" and then add "ees," with the accent on the "ees."

— Anais Nin

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

— Anais Nin

I am the one who has felt most deeply the stuttering of the tongue in its relation to thought.

— Anais 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.

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.

— Anais Nin

Living never wore one so much as the effort not to live.

— Anais Nin

You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this.

— Anais Nin

The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.

— Anais Nin

When she did finally fall asleep it was the restless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.

— Anais Nin

The dream has to be translated into reality.

— Anais Nin

For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated.

— Anais Nin

Most fiction writers uses dreams decoratively without relating them to daily life, but the contemporary writer is becoming more expert at detecting the influence of one upon the other.

— Anais Nin

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

— Anais Nin

The dream, scrutinized by scientists in various experiments, has been found to be an absolute necessity to man.

— Anais Nin

The hallucinatory drugs only reveal the world of images we contain but do not teach us interpretation, illumination, or enlightenment.

— Anais Nin

By shutting out the outside world, drugs place one not only in confrontation with the dreaming self, but also ones nightmares.

— Anais Nin

Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and to art.

— Anais Nin

I think that natural truths will cease to be spat at us like insults, that aesthetics will once more be linked with ethics, and that people will become aware that in casting out aesthetics that they also cast out a respect for human life, a respect for creation, a respect for spiritual values. Aesthetics was an expression of man's need to be in love with his world. The cult of ugliness is a regression. It destroys our appetite, our love for our world.

— Anais Nin

It was a misunderstanding to stress the dream like quality of the novels. What I meant to stress was the interrelation between dream and life, between dream and action.

— Anais Nin

The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.

— Anais Nin

The necessity for fiction was probably born of the problem of taboo on certain revelations. It was not only a need of the imagination but an answer to the limitations placed on portrayal of others.

— Anais Nin

Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

— Anais Nin

The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted.

— Anais Nin

We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.

— Anais 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.

— Anais 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.

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

People living deeply have no fear of death.

— Anais Nin

Dreams are necessary to life.

— Anais Nin

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

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

People living deeply have no fear of death.

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

— Anais Nin

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

— Anais Nin

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

— Anais Nin

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

— Anais Nin

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

— Anais Nin

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

— Anais Nin

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

— Anais Nin

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

— Anais Nin

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

— Anais Nin

life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat.

— Anais Nin

People living deeply have no fear of death.

— Anais Nin

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

— Anais 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.

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.

— Anais 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. I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self. I remember my first birth in water.

— Anais Nin

Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.

— Anais Nin

If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other, if only I could save you all from yourselves.

— Anais Nin

When one is pretending the entire body revolts.

— Anais Nin

Only in the fever of creation could she recreate her own lost life.

— Anais 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. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.

— Anais Nin

This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men’s dreams.

— Anais Nin

Every word you wrote I ate, as if it were manna. Finding one's self in a book is a second birth; and you are the only one who knows that at times men behave like women and women like men, and that all these distinctions are mock distinctions.

— Anais Nin

Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.

— Anais Nin

Solitude may rust your words.

— Anais Nin

The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.

— Anais Nin

I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored. D. H. Lawrence began to give instinct a language, he tried to escape the clinical, the scientific, which only captures what the body feels.

— Anais Nin

Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment.

— Anais Nin

Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage.

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

Electric flesh-arrows 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.

— Anais Nin

The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.

— Anais Nin

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

— Anais Nin

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

— Anais Nin

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

— Anais Nin

The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.

— Anais Nin

For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds...

— Anais Nin

My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.

— Anais Nin

Passion gives me moments of wholeness.

— Anais Nin

We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.

— Anais Nin

Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.

— Anais Nin

Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a worldly way.

— Anais Nin

Love reduces the complexity of living.

— Anais Nin

A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.

— Anais Nin

The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.

— Anais Nin

To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.

— Anais Nin

I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes.

— Anais Nin

There will never be darkness because in both of us there's always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection has been a still experience...

— Anais Nin

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

— Anais Nin

This abdiction of life demanded of the artist is to be achieved only relatively. Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents.

— Anais Nin

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

I need a place where I can shout and weep. I have to be a Spanish savage at some time of the day. I record here the hysteria life causes in me. The overflow of an undisciplined extravagance. To hell with taste and art, with all contractions and polishings. Here I shout, I dance, I weep, I gnash my teeth, I go mad — all by myself, in bad English, in chaos. It will keep me sane for the world and for art .

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration.

— Anais Nin

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

— Anais Nin

People living deeply have no fear of death.

— Anais Nin

He was insane with anger. Or is all insanity anger?

— Anais Nin

You cannot save people, you can only love them.

— Anais Nin

I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

Someday I'll be locked up for love insanity. "She loved too much."

— Anais Nin

The times in his studio when he washed his hands and they smoked, for his hands were so warm and the water so cold.

— Anais 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.

— Anais Nin

He left me at my hotel at 3:00 AM murmuring: "You're marvelous."

— Anais Nin