Anais Nin Quotes
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
Anais Nin
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.
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.
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
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.
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.
Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.
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 naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.
Anais Nin
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
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.
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.
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".
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
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.
When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
Dreams are necessary to life.
If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.
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.
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
Only in the fever of creation could she recreate her own lost life.
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.
Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.
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.
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.
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.
What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?
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.
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as 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.
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
Good things happen to those who hustle.
The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
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.
It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.
Anais Nin
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book(Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom(when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this(or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.
Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
People living deeply have no fear of death.
I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's 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 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.
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.
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
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.
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.
There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. 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. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
