Nin Quotes

My attraction to drugs is based on an immense desire to annihilate awareness.

Our age has need of violence, " he writes. And he is violence.

For our anxiety is the one thing we cannot place on the shoulders of others, it suffocates them.

I never lose sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled.

Wherever there is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me.

We are dancing on our irony as upon the top of glowing sparks.

The relief of opening one's hand and letting go was immense. But soon after, I tightened again. A desire for revenge, a strange revenge.

Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one...

When you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive

Do you have regrets that we were so overwhelmed? Do you ever wish to live those hours over again and differently, with more confidence.

What I cannot love, I overlook.

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.

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

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

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

We are more severe judges of our own acts... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.

There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.

But my faith seems naive, at least today. Maybe tomorrow I can believe again.

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

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

Out of worship and out of love he would let no one light the stove for her either, as if he would be the warmth and the fire to dry and warm her feet.

And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

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.

How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?

Her hair was full of lights

...then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer.

Enriched vocabularies someone had (and used) are produced by a boundless wondrous mind. Sometime with a non mediocre experience also.

And in his eyes he had the look of the cat who inspires a desire to caress but loves no one, who never feels he must respond to the impulses he arouses.

She abandoned herself to his whim, thinking it was to be an orgy of eyes and hands only.

[Y]ou have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.

We see the world not as it is, but as we are.

I put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all.

Wherever this is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me.

Motherhood is a vocation like any other. It should be freely chosen, not imposed upon woman.

Even when they did not look at each other or speak to each other, he could feel a powerful current between them.

He never treated her as a wife. He wooed her over and over again, with presents, flowers, new pleasures.

Every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.

Later he´ll be drunk in extremis and will only be able to speak the esperanto of alcoholics, which is a language full of stutterings from the geological layers of our animal ancestors

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.