Anaïs Nin Quotes

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.

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

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

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.

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.

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

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

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 hate men who are afraid of women's strength.

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

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

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

Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

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

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.

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.

I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them.

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 do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.

Dreams are necessary to life.

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all. . .

In chaos, there is fertility.

Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.

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.

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.

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

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.

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

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.

The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.

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.

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

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

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.

We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.

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

I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.

I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously.

That we cannot rise equal to situations when we are in them — that is the tragedy of life.

They courted the face on the screen, the face of translucence, the face of wax on which men found it possible to imprint the image of their fantasy.

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

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

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

This great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes air, or swallows a snowflake, or yields to the sun.