Anais Nin Quotes

Anxiety is loves greatest killer.

The softness of the summer day like an ermine paw.

You marry the day you realize the human defects of your love.

A man fell in love with Jeanne, and she tried to love him. But she complained that he uttered such ordinary words, that he could never say the magic phrase which would open her being.

To love and to labor is the sum of living.

I spell 'god' with a small 'g' because I do not believe in him, but I love to swear by him.

Hollywood is a mirage factory.

Houses turn to corpses overnight when we cease to live and love in them.

I love man as creator, lover, husband, friend, but man the father I do not trust. I do not believe in man as father. I do not trust man as father.

My trunk, valises and my mind are overpacked.

... America is the greatest humiliator in existence. It is always cultivating the power you get from humiliating others.

At first she beckoned and lured one into her world; then, she blurred the passageways, confused all the images, as if to elude detection.

To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.

I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.

One may gain one truth at the expense of another.

In every relationship, sooner or later, there is a court scene. Accusations, counter-accusations, a trial, a verdict.

We sit on the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds.

Great repressions create dualities.

When I first met him, he did not care if a friend did not fit into his world, because at that time his world had not been born yet.

Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.

America hates the artist. It will not admit: the artist is my soul and I want to kill off my soul.

In my dreams I sleep with everybody.

I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly.

Our love lives because I live.

To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard

They clutch and cling and howl when I leave them, but how badly they love.

When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.

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.

[Families] are made to make you forget yourself occasionally so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.

What I cannot love I overlook.

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.

I was thinking of my patients and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate they were in despair.

I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself because it always changes me.

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

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

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.

A war regarded as inevitable or even probable and therefore much prepared for has a very good chance of eventually being fought.

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.

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