Anais Nin Quotes

Now that I am moving, I am afraid. Where am I going?

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.

We do not see the world as it is. We see the word as we are.

Asia discovered two remedies for the cruelty of man, art and religion. America discarded both and is drowning in hate and aggressivity.

The complaints of the child in us will never cease lamenting until it is consoled, answered, understood. Only then will it lie still in us, like our fears. It will die in peace and leave us what the child leaves to the man - the sense of wonder.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.

Guilt is the one burden human beings can't bear alone.

Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body's breath, and the strings' wails and moans are echoes of the body's music. It is the body's vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.

There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection.

The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.

There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.

It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it.

I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate. It was not a matter of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair.

Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate. I hate murderously.

I have no brakes on...analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life.

She makes use of the soft of the bread for a napkin. She falls asleep at times with shoes on, on unmade beds. When a little money comes in, June buys delicacies, strawberries in the winter, caviar and bath salts.

I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.

gold never comes to the dreamers - except in dreams.

If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.

If I fall asleep, it is because I am overloaded. I sleep because one hour with Henry contains five years of my life, and one phrase, one caress answers the expectations of a hundred nights. When I hear him laugh, I say, "I have heard Rabelais.". And I swallow his laughter like bread and wine.

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.

You are the poet, you walk inside my dreams.

I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.

A man fell in love with Jeanne, and she tried to love him. But she complained that he uttered such ordinary words, that he could never say the magic phrase which would open her being.

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

All that is sacred and taboo in the world are meaningless.

I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.

The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery. Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream.

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

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

To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.

I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously.

When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts. Naked now, he lay his full length over her. She enjoyed his weight on her, enjoyed being crushed under his body. She wanted him soldered to her, from mouth to feet. Shivers passed through her body.

Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.

We are never trapped unless we choose to be.

I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life.

For all of my patients sensuality is a giving in to 'the low side of their nature.' Puritanism is powerful and distorts their life with a total anesthesia of the senses. If you atrophy one sense, you also atrophy all the others, a sensuous and physical connection with nature, with art, with food, with other human beings.

I would like to have your sureness. I am waiting for love, the core of a woman's life." Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.

Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an artist.

We have been poisoned by fairy tales.

Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.

It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.

The shell is America's most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early.

But the artist persists because he has the will to create, and this is the magic power which can transform and transfigure and transpose and which will ultimately be transmitted to others.