Anais Nin Quotes

she acquired the certainty of the expansion of time by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity of experience.

Your eyes make me shy

Instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse’s, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle testing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into this mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation - indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert.

jazz is the expression of America's romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force.

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

Either one fails in one's art or in one's life.

Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it.

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

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.

Acapulco in the sunset seems like a balm; it enters the blood like a drug after one inhalation of the scent of flowers, one glimpse of the bay iridescent like silk, the sunset like the inside of a shell, so much like the flesh of Venus.

The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.

He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.

In each studio there is a human being dressed in the full regalia of his myth fearing to expore a vulnerable opening, spreading not his charms but his defences, plotting to disrobe, somewhere along the night-- his body without the aperture of the heart or his heart with a door closed to his body. thus keeping one compartment for refuge, one uninvaded cell.

Anxiety is loves greatest killer.

To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.

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

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.

At first she beckoned and lured one into her world; then, she blurred the passageways, confused all the images, as if to elude detection.

The inner chambers of the soul are like the photographer's darkroom. Like a laboratory. One cannot stay there all the time or it becomes the solitary cell of the neurotic.

There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.

I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.

I want to make my own discoveries…….penetrate the evil which attracts me

If you can't create, you destroy.

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

I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self.

It is in the movements of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately.

Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions have given them? Give me your hat.

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

... and the very folds of the curtains contained secrets and sighs.

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.

In music I feel most deeply the passing of things.

... America is the greatest humiliator in existence. It is always cultivating the power you get from humiliating others.

atrophy of feeling creates criminals.

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

willingness to explore everything is a sign of strength. The weak ones have prejudices. Prejudices are a protection.

Travel is seeking the lost paradise. It is the supreme illusion of love.

I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

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

Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

Why do I doubt her? Perhaps she is just very sensitive, and hypersensitive people are false when others doubt them; they waver. And one thinks them insincere. Yet I want to believe her. At the same time it does not seem so very important that she should love me. It is not her role. I am so filled with my love of her. And at the same time I feel that I am dying. Our love would be death. The embrace of imaginings.

We also write to heighten our own awareness of life... We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it...to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely... When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking... I feel I lose my fire and my color.

The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted.

Passion gives me moments of wholeness.

People who want a sane, static, measurable world take the first aspect of an event or person and stick to it, with an almost self-protective obstinacy, or by a natural limitation of their imaginations. They do not indulge in either deepening or magnifying.