Anais Nin Quotes

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly.

I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.

It is difficult to live with the pure. They do not condemn you; they forgive you. This forgiveness is more terrible than a judgment.

But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted.

The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.

perhaps the only magician we have is the artist.

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.

One may gain one truth at the expense of another.

The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.

He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it.

I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived.

notes fly so much farther than words. There is no other way to reach the infinite.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.

Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.

Again I take a taxi to Clichy address, but feel that I do not want to go on loving Henry more actively than he loves me (having realized that nobody will ever love me in that overabundant, overexpressive, overthoughtful, overhuman way I love people), and so I will wait for him. So I ask taxi driver to drop me at the Galeries Lafayette, where I begin to look for a new hat and to shop for Christmas. Pride? I don't know. A kind of wise retreat. I need people too much. So I bury my gigantic defect, my overflow of love, under trivialities, like a child. I amuse myself with a new hat.

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.

In my dreams I sleep with everybody.

If a person continues to see only giants, it means he is still seeing the world through the eyes of a child. I have a feeling that man's fear of woman comes from having first seen her as the mother, creator of men.

For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue — that I had to do the job myself.

Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.

Your strength is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

I either eat too much or starve myself. Sleep for 14 hours or have insomniac nights. Fall in love very hard or hate passionately. I don't know what grey is. I never did.

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

myself ... is merely an instrument to connect life and a myth

Nothing endures unless it has first been transposed into a myth, and the great advantage of myths is that they are ladies with portable roots.

You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You will always be a part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we shared, at some moment, the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.

With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness... something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame, annihilate him, with a pleasure never known before.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. 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. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.

You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers - you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance.

I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated

Often, though, the passivity of the woman's role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? It terrifies me. Do women act thus? Does June go to Henry when she wants him? Does she mount him? Does she wait for him? He guides my inexperienced hands. It is like a forest fire, to be with him. New places of my body are aroused and burnt. He is incendiary. I leave him in an unquenchable fever.

Good things happen to those who hustle.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

"We see the world as 'we' are, not as 'it' is; because it is the "I" behind the 'eye' that does the seeing."

Will you come down and kiss me good night?

I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me.

The way to recognize a dead word is that it exudes boredom.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.