Anais Nin Quotes

When I stand at the top of the Champs-Elysées, with its chestnut trees in flower, its undulations of shining cars, its white spaciousness, I feel as if I were biting into a utopian fruit, something velvety and lustrous and rich and vivid.

..he made me understand something very important. Whether because I am a Latin, or because I am a neurotic, I have a need of gestures. I am myself expressive, demonstrative; every feeling I have takes on expression: words, gestures, signs, letters, articulateness or action. I need this in others.

The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

There is an ugliness in being paid for work one does not like.

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

I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension

I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.

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

Write. Write until it stops hurting.

At sixteen, Sabina took moon baths, first of all, because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous.

For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated.

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

Things aren't the way they are, they're the way you are

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

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

When one is pretending the entire body revolts.

To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school [of writing]. A hunger for the unknown and an aspiration toward beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial.

Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once.

The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.

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

I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt.

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.

My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure.

I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it.

Jeanne, I fell asleep among the paintings, where I could sit for many days worshipping your portrait. I fell in love with your portrait, Jeanne, because it will never change. I have such a fear of seeing you grow old, Jeanne, I fell in love with an unchanging you that will never be taken away from me. I was wishing you would die, so that no one could take you away from me, and I would love the painting of you as you would look eternally.

The true liberation of eroticism lies in accepting the fact that there are a million facets to it, a million forms of eroticism, a million objects of it, situations, atmospheres, and variations. We have, first of all, to dispense with guilt concerning its expansion, then remain open to it's surprises, varied expressions, and mingle it with dreams, fantasies, and emotion for it to attain its highest potency.

Ordinary life does not interest me.

[in the]..curious way that my idealism has been mixed with my fatalism, so that I can possess the soul of a dreamer and that of a cynic at the same time......I possess a power of magic...[to] destroy the balance of a well-designed destiny with my diabolical mind.

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

We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks.

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.

What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.

No one should be forced to carry the unfulfilled self of another.

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

Tropical nights are hammocks for lovers.

To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.

Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

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

Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge.

The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world.

The real wonders of life lie in the depths. Exploring the depths for truths is the real wonder which the child and the artist know: magic and power lie in truth.

The softness of the summer day like an ermine paw.

I have a prejudice against people with money. I have known so many, and none have escaped the corruption of power. In this I am a purist. I love people motivated by love and not by power. If you have money and power, and are motivated by love, you give it all away.

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

To love and to labor is the sum of living.

The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.

There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.