Anais Quotes & Sayings

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion. — Anais Nin

In view of her present ease, Anais Nin knows that the description of what she was like as a child will be difficult to accept and so will occasion laughter [...] Nin also knows, however, how much we need to believe that such a triumph over handicaps is possible and how much our admiration for an accomplished person can be discouraging rather than encouraging to our own aspirations if we are not reminded of the struggles that preceded that success. Finally, she also knows that the tendency to cling to the idea that the person who exhibits remarkable qualities was invariably born with exceptional talents and advantages may be an inverted way of rationalizing one's own passivity and mediocrity. — Evelyn Hinz

As he clutched her in his shaking hands and wept against her, he whispered into her ear, the words that made him believe. "Love bears all things. Endures all things," he said. "Ours has, hasn't it?" She nodded and held him tighter. "But can it endure this, Anais? This demon who holds me so mercilessly in its claws?"
She touched his face and kissed him. "My love can and will, Lindsay. I will be here when you open your eyes. I will give you whatever you need to make it more bearable. — Charlotte Featherstone

My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living. — Anais Nin

We don't see people as they are. We see people as we are. — Anais Nin

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

E 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. — Anais Nin

Anxiety is love's greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning. — Anais Nin

Notes fly so much farther than words. There is no other way to reach the infinite. — Anais Nin

[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 ... — Anais Nin

I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her. She will be June plus all that I contain. — Anais Nin

Our age has need of violence, he writes. And he is violence. — Anais Nin

There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time. — Anais Nin

The bed must be a beautiful place, not only because you make love there but because you dream there as well. — Anais Nin

It is right that you should read according to your temperament, occupations, hobbies, and vocations. But it is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar, unwilling to explore the unfamiliar. In science, we respect the research worker. In literature, we should not always read the books blessed by the majority. — Anais Nin

When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness. — Anais Nin

The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again. — Anais Nin

There are things one reads that make you aware that you have lived nothing, felt nothing, experienced nothing up to that time. How can i begin to feel - to feel? 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. — Anais Nin

Literature, the ultimate gift for expressing the most subtle aspects of man's thought and feeling, may not survive persecution: first by religion, then by the bourgeoisie, then by Marxism, and now by commercialism. The — Anais Nin

The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic. — Anais Nin

She fell in love with an extinct volcano. — Anais Nin

The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of postponement, failed communications, failed communions. This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters. meetings, introductions, which might contain the seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked. This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. 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. — Anais Nin

I'm putting back into the self the responsibility for the collective life. If each one of us took very seriously the fact that every little act, every little word we utter, every injury we do to another human being is really what is projected into larger issues; if we could once begin to think of it that way, then each one of us, like a small cell, would do the work of creating a human self, a kind of self who wouldn't have ghettos, a kind of self that wouldn't go to war. Then we could begin to have the cell which would influence and enormous amount of cells around you. I don't think we can measure the radius of the personal influence of one person, within the home, outside of the home, in the neighborhood, and finally in national affairs. — Anais Nin

My trunk, valises and my mind are overpacked. — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman. — Anais Nin

To capture the drama of the unconscious, one had to start with the key, and the key was the dream. But the novelist's task was to pursue this dream, to unravel its meaning; the goal was to reach the relation of dream to life; the suspense was in finding this which led to a deeper significance of our acts. — Anais Nin

Then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer. — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

Our love lives because I live. — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people's. — Anais Nin

We're journeying constantly, but there is always a machine and books, and your body is always close to me and the look in your eyes never changes. People are saying we will be miserable, we will regret, but we are happy, we are laughing always, we are singing. We are talking Spanish and French and — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

You marry the day you realize the human defects of your love. — Anais Nin

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with. — Anais Nin

This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men's dreams. — Anais Nin

At night too, she puzzled the mystery of her desperate need of kindness. As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a lover, or for wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently: let him be kind. — Anais Nin

Like the Baron, Mathilde developed a formula for acting out life as a series of roles - that is, by saying to herself in the morning while brushing her blond hair, "Today I want to become this or that person," and then proceeding to be that person.
One day she decided she would like to be an elegant representative of a well-known Parisian modiste and go to Peru. All she had to do was to act the role. So she dressed with care, presented herself with extraordinary assurance at the house of the modiste, was engaged to be her representative and given a boat ticket to Lima.
Aboard ship, she behaved like a French missionary of elegance. Her innate talent for recognizing good wines, good perfumes, good dressmaking, marked her as a lady of refinement. — Anais Nin

In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection. — Anais Nin

Was it not an act of love to impersonate the loved one? — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

Laughter and tears are not separate experiences, with intervals of rest: they rush out together and it is like walking with a sword between your legs. — Anais Nin

The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have ... excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails. — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you. — Anais Nin

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

I will not be just a tourist in a world of images. — Anais Nin

What makes some butterflies have such beautiful colors on their wings, and others not?" "The plain ones were born of parents who didn't know how to paint. — Anais Nin

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect. — Anais Nin

For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love. — Anais Nin

That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe. — Anais Nin

Doubt tortures me. There is a twist in me, my fear of interpretation. — Anais Nin

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. — Anais Nin

And the very folds of the curtains contained secrets and sighs. — Anais Nin

His theatre was the clouds, where no spectacle repeated itself. On land he was a foreigner. Land for him was stasis, and it pulled him into immobility, which was his image of death.
- , — Anais Nin

That night Fay became a woman, making a secret of her pain, intent on saving her happiness with Albert, on showing wisdom and subtlety. — Anais Nin

And in his eyes he had the look of the cat who inspires a desire to caress but loves no one, who never feels he must respond to the impulses he arouses. — Anais Nin

Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness. — Anais Nin

Believing in the danger which sprang from objects as well as people, which dress, which shoes, which coat demanded less of her panicked heart and body? For a costume was a challenge too, a discipline, a trap which once adopted could influence the actor. — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous. — Anais Nin

He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt. — Anais Nin

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

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. — Anais Nin

Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one ... — Anais Nin

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

I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essentially human, not intellectual. I do not understand abstract act. Only art born of love, passion, pain. — Anais Nin

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

Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to this poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, 'Climb! — Anais Nin

Either one fails in one's art or in one's life. — Anais Nin

Passion gives me moments of wholeness — Anais Nin

Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you. — Anais Nin

Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold. — Anais Nin

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book ... or you take a trip ... and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken. — Anais Nin

The inner hatreds of men are now projected outside. There are fights in the streets. Revolutions in France, they say. Men did not seek to resolve their own personal revolutions, so now they act them out collectively. — Anais Nin

Of course, you'll defend Jay," says Rango, He was a part of your former life, of your former values. I will never be able to alter that. I want you to think as I do."
"But Rango, you couldn't respect someone who surrendered an opinion merely to please you . It would be hypocrisy. — Anais Nin

When a person does aggravate like a plaguing itch, acceptance is no matter. — Sian Lavinia Anais Valeriana

It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before ... to test yout limits ... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossum. — Anais Nin

Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives. — Anais Nin

This openness, which is closed again as soon as we face a partial relationship, the one who understands only one part of us, is the miraculous openess which takes place in whole love. — Anais Nin

Her hair was full of lights — Anais Nin

Nothing seems true today except the death of the goldfish who used to make love at ninety kilometers an hour in the pool. The maid has given him a Christian burial. To the worms! To the worms! — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself. — Anais Nin

Life shrinks and expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anais Nin — Mark Manson

I was shy, withdrawn, and read obsessionally. But I never wanted to be anyone else other than me. — Anais Nin

To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one's mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use. — Anais Nin

If you can't create, you destroy. — Anais Nin

Emma stared at the ceiling of the hotel room. Her thoughts went over every memorial, each picture, the families and children left behind. At this point it was a nightly routine. Some people counted sheep. Emma counted her father's victims. One by one. — Anais Torres

Everything but happiness is neurosis. — Anais Nin

I will cover the walls with words. It will be la chambre des mots. — Anais Nin

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

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

I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. 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. I don't mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding. — Anais Nin

Does she know I feel immobile and fixed, lost in her? — Anais Nin

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

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are. — Anais Nin