Anais Nin Quotes

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.

I don't mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated

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.

Talk—half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman—like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again.

I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love.

The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.

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

The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.

Violence is a symptom of impotence.

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

Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy.

[On Paris:] A city never entirely known, yet which gives you the feeling of intimacy, of possessing it intimately.

His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that...only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it.

He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself. . . . For him the only danger came from the microbes that attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which eats into the soul.

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. 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.

Is devotion to others a cover for the hungers and the needs of the self, of which one is ashamed? I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not virtue. It was a disguise.

Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

I am a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough.

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.