Anais Nin Quotes

The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams.

We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.

Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we ... believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

She walked in the shadow of Rango with a great feeling of being taken out of herself, of having no knowledge of what was happening to her, merely a pervading sense of flow.

The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.

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.

Hollywood is a mirage factory.

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason.

Sexual intercourse... a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous impaling of woman on man's sensual mast.

She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness...A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there.

I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman

I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

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.

although I love a rich life, I hate an overcrowded life. I believe in rumination and lose half the beauty of all things when I am deprived of the time to ruminate.

Big Business and Politics are twins, they are the monsters who kill everything, corrupt everything.

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.

When I hear of people who weary of each other, I believe it is because they have sought virtues in themselves alone, attractions of physical beauty. Have they based their love on each other's thoughts? Who can weary of thoughts which change every day?

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.

He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away.

The one who travels like a lover searching for a new passion is suddenly blessed with new eyes, new ears, new senses.

I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits

I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness.

The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.

To commit suicide is easy. To live without a god is more difficult. The drunkenness of triumph is greater than the drunkenness of sacrifice.

All the art of analysis consists in saying a truth only when the other person is ready for it, has been prepared for it by an organic process of gradation and evolution.

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.

I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams.

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

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

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

You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead.

The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have...excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage "People living deeply have no fear of death.

What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.

Analysis does not take into account the creative products of neurotic desires.

In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action.

I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.

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

Descendants of pigeons once fed by Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin and many other famous lovers are still being fed, and the sudden sound when they all rise together, frightened away, is like the sound of giant sails flapping.

A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.

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.

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.

We see things the way we are, not the way they are.

All unlived emotions turn to inanity.

I told her, "We have both lost ourselves, but sometimes we reveal the most when we are least like ourselves. I am not trying to think any more. I can't think when I am with you. You are like me, wishing for a perfect moment, but nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a worldly way. Neither one of us can say just the right thing. We are overwhelmed. Let us be overwhelmed. It is so lovely, so lovely. I love you June.

We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing aggression in human beings. And when one sees in psychoanalysis hostility disappearing as people conquer their fears, one wonders if the cure is not there.

Through love, through friendship, a heart lives more than one life.