Nin Quotes

Love men and women not for their strength but their softness, not for their fullness but their hunger, not for their plenty but their need.

Every individual is representative of the whole . . . and should be intimately understood, and this would give a far greater understanding of mass movements and sociology.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

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

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

The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty.

Convalescence. Such an utter weakness that you lie like an animal hibernating, playing possum. You float. You are adrift. Every current is stronger than you.

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living.

When I am most deeply rooted, I feel the wildest desire to uproot myself.

When I cannot bear outer pressures anymore, I begin to put order in my belongings...As if unable to organize and control my life, I seek to exert this on the world of objects.

Your strength is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same.

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

The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.

I don't wish power, only art -art and passion.

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.

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.

The risk it takes to remain tight inside the bud is more painful than the risk it takes to blossom. We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.

I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.

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

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

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

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.

Introspection is a devouring monster.

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

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

If one's conscious life is too rigid, too regimented, then the surface may crack at times, and we are unprepared for the strange emotions or sensations we experience.

Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

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

Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of himself that he does not see himself in the mirror.

All unlived emotions turn to inanity.

Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it.

Balance is not to be sought by association with others; it must exist within one's self.

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.

The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.

The bed must be a beautiful place, not only because you make love there but because you dream there as well.

Jazz is the music of the body.

I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood.

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.

Tropical nights are hammocks for lovers.

I write emotional algebra.

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

perhaps the only magician we have is the artist.

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.

One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.

Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.

I have this weird obsession about buying books and looking at them with a smile, even if I won't read them soon. At least they are mine now.

Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their mysteries and secrets, they act and pretend. I like the character of men better.

What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.