Quotes & Sayings About Love Anais Nin

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, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt. — Anais Nin

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

I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood. — Anais Nin

I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept about people around me was that all of them were coordinated into a WHOLE, whereas I was made up of multiple selves, of fragments. I know that I was upset as a child to discover that we had only one life. It seems to me that I wanted to compensate for this by multiplying experience. Or perhaps it always seems like this when you follow all your impulses and they take you in different directions. In any case, when I was happy, always at the beginning of a love, euphoric, I felt I was gifted for living many lives fully. It was only when I was in trouble, lost in a maze, stifled by complications and paradoxes that I was haunted or that I spoke of my "madness," but I meant the madness of the poets. — Anais Nin

I want to love you wildly. I don't want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced. — Anais Nin

Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy. — Anais Nin

June, you have killed my sincerity too. I will never again know who I am, what I am, what I love, what I want. Your beauty has drowned me, the core of me. You carry away with you a part of me reflected in you. When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You are the woman I want to be. I see in you that part of me which is you. I feel compassion for your childish pride, for your trembling unsureness, your dramatization of events, your enhancing of the loves given to you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madness. — Anais Nin

I love you, June, and you know how acutely, how desperately. You know that no one can say or do anything to shake my love. I have taken you into myself, whole. You need have no fear of being unmasked, only loved. — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

Why can't we know those we love are about to die, so as to give them the words of love they need, the last praise or reassurance? We could not bear to know, but that is not true, for it is in the not knowing that is prepared all the sources of our suffering later. We are still like animals; we do not tell our thoughts or our feelings. — Anais Nin

Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she is bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child rearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to be. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment man rests inside of her. — Anais Nin

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

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

Hugo and I yield entirely to each other. We cannot be without each other, we cannot endure discord, war, estrangement, we cannot take walks alone, we do not like to travel without each other. We have yielded in spite of our individualism, our hatred of intimacy. We have absorbed our egocentric selves into our love. Our love is our ego. — Anais Nin

Anais: 'I made a note to ask you why I am obsessed with a few persons only. Why are my devotions so concentrated on a few people? I do not spread out as Henry does.' Dr. Allendy: 'Yes, exactly, it is a bad sign. You do not really confide in many people, then they do not know you, and then you quickly surmise they do not understand and love you. On the few people you feel connected with, you pour a lavish devotion. This must cease. In love, too, one must relinquish to really love. You cannot admit rivalry. The more broadly and expansively you love, without exclusiveness, the more you reach the mystic whole, the larger sense of love, the less individualistic, the more universal love. — Anais Nin

They had reached a perfect moment of human love. They had created a moment of perfect understanding and accord. This highest moment would now remain as point of comparison to torment them later on when all natural imperfections would disintegrate it. — 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

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

I spell 'god' with a small 'g' because I do not believe in him, but I love to swear by him. — Anais Nin

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them. — Anais Nin

Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions. — Anais Nin

You haven't loved yet," he said. "You've only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, illusion is not love, desire alone is not love. All these were paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way. — Anais Nin

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

Anxiety is loves greatest killer. — Anais Nin

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. — 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

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

In my childhood diary I wrote: I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much. — Anais Nin

Before, as soon as I came home from all sorts of places I would sit down and write in my journal. Now I want to write you, talk with you ... I love when you say all that happens is good, it is good. I say all that happens is wonderful. For me it is all symphonic, and I am so aroused by living - god, Henry, in you alone I have found the same swelling of enthusiasm, the same quick rising of the blood, the fullness ... Before, I almost used to think there was something wrong. Everybody else seemed to have the brakes on ... I never feel the brakes. I overflow. And when I feel your excitement about life flaring, next to mine, then it makes me dizzy. — 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

Why is that I never get cut off from pity, sympathy, participation, in spite of the fact that I am living out of my own dream, my interior vision, my fantasies without any interruptions. I dream, I kiss, I have orgasms, I get exalted, I leave the world, I float, I cook, I sew, have nightmares, write in my head, compose, decompose, improvise, invent, I listen to all, I hear all that is said, I feel Spain, I am aware, I am everywhere , I am open to wounds, open to love, I am rooted to my devotions, I am never separete, I am never cut off, never blind, deaf, absent. I hold on to the dream which makes life possible, to the creation which transfigures, to the God who sustains, to the crimes which gave life, to the illusions which makes the marvelous possible. I hold on to the poetry and the human simplicities. — Anais Nin

I cannot live without love. Love is at the root of my being. — Anais Nin

You fall in love with people's minds. — Anais Nin

Music spilling out of from the eyes in place of tears, music spilling from the throat in place of words, music falling from his fingertips in place of caresses, music exchanged between them instead of love, yearning of five lines, the five lines of their thoughts , their reveries, their emotions, their unknown self, their giant self, their shadow. — Anais Nin

Our love lives because I live. — Anais Nin

Why does a gesture, a walk, stir your blood? What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no drug and no alcohol to equal it. — Anais Nin

He was whispering over and over again the same phrase, "You have the body of an angel. It is impossible that such a body should have a sex. You have the body of an angel." The anger swept over Fay like a fever, an anger at his moving his penis away from her hand. She sat up, her hair wild about her shoulders, and said, "I am not an angel, Albert. I am a woman. I want you to love me as a woman. — Anais Nin

I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them. — Anais Nin

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

By the end of the evening I was like a man, terribly in love with her face and body, which promised so much, and I hated the self created in her by others. Others feel because of her; and because of her, others write poetry; because of her, others hate; others, like Henry, love her in spite of themselves. — Anais Nin

Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it, to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: "I don't understand — Anais Nin

I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me. — Anais Nin

Now, his hair is white and he no longer understands anyone's need to love, for he has lost everything, not to love, but to his games of love; and when you love as a game, you lose everything, as he lost his home and wife, and now he clings to me, afraid of loss, afraid of solitude. — 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

The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence. Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and color in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams, and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.
The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment.
No moment of charm without long roots in the past, no moment of charm is born on bare soil, a careless accident of beauty, but is the sum of great sorrows, growths, and efforts.
But love, the great narcotic, was the hothouse in which all the selves burst into their fullest bloom ... — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

Coming near him like a ballet dancer she took a leap towards him, and he, frightened by her vehemence, and fearing that she would crash against him, instinctively became absolutely rigid, and she felt herself embracing a statue. — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

Men from the mountains always dream of the sea, and above all things I love to travel. — Anais Nin

We love best those who are, or act for us, a self we do not wish to be or act out. — Anais Nin

You don't find love, it finds you. It's got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what's written in the stars. — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

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

The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest. — Anais Nin

Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer. — 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

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

I feel that from the very beginning life played a terrible conjurer's trick on me. I lost faith in it. It seems to me that every moment now it is playing tricks on me. So that when I hear love I am not sure it is love, and when I hear gaiety I am not sure it is gaiety, and when I have eaten and loved and I am all warm from wine, I am not sure it is either love or food or wine, but a strange trick being played on me, an illusion, slippery and baffling and malicious, and a magician hangs behind me watching the ecstasy I feel at the things which happen so that I know deep down it is all fluid and escaping and may vanish at any moment. Don't forget to write me a letter and tell me I was here, and I saw you, and loved you, and ate with you. It is all so evanescent and I love it so much, I love it as you love the change in the days. — Anais Nin

They clutch and cling and howl when I leave them, but how badly they love. — Anais Nin

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. — Anais Nin

Too late for changes, too late perhaps for explanations and ideological webs, but the love goes on, the love goes on, blind to laws and warnings and even to wisdom and to fears. And whatever that love is, perhaps an illusion of a new love, I want it, I cant resist it, my whole being melts in one kiss, my knowledge melts, my fears melt, my blood dances, my legs open. — Anais Nin

Although I love a rich life, I hate an overcrowded life. I believe in rumination and lose half the beauty of all things when I am deprived of the time to ruminate. — Anais Nin

Houses turn to corpses overnight when we cease to live and love in them. — Anais Nin

I was sure the old man knew nothing about the beatitudes, ecstasies, dazzling reverberations of sexual encounters. Cut out the poetry was his message. Clinical sex, deprived of all the warmth of love - the orchestration of all the senses, touch, hearing, sight, palate; all the euphoric accompaniments, back-ground music, moods, atmosphere, variations - forced him to resort to literary aphrodisiacs. — Anais Nin

You can't save people, you can only love them. — Anais Nin

As soon as I kiss him I know that I love him with a blind instinct beyond all reason, with all his defects. — Anais Nin

And silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxication life, instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions, mathematics of emotion in place of violent impact, the volcanic eruptions of fever, lust and delight. — Anais Nin

I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it. — Anais Nin

Jeanne, I fell asleep among the paintings, where I could sit for many days worshipping your portrait. I fell in love with your portrait, Jeanne, because it will never change. I have such a fear of seeing you grow old, Jeanne, I fell in love with an unchanging you that will never be taken away from me. I was wishing you would die, so that no one could take you away from me, and I would love the painting of you as you would look eternally. — Anais Nin

When I hear of people who weary of each other, I believe it is because they have sought virtues in themselves alone, attractions of physical beauty. Have they based their love on each other's thoughts? Who can weary of thoughts which change every day? — Anais Nin

Men can be in love with literary figures, with poetic and mythological figures, but let them meet with Artemis, with Venus, with any of the goddesses of love, and then they start hurling moral judgments. — Anais Nin

Love reduces the complexity of living. It amazes me that when Henry walks towards the cafe table where I wait for him, or opens the gate to our house, the sight of him is sufficient to exult me. No letter from anyone, even in praise of my book, can stir me as much as a note from him. — Anais Nin

I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream. — Anais Nin

I love man as creator, lover, husband, friend, but man the father I do not trust. I do not believe in man as father. I do not trust man as father. — Anais Nin

Hugo has been infinitely tender with me, but while he talks of June I think of our hands locked together. She does not reach the same sexual center of my being that man reaches; she does not touch that. What, then, has she moved in me? I have wanted to possess her as if I were a man, but I have also wanted her to love me with the eyes, the hands, the senses that only women have. It is a soft and subtle penetration. — Anais Nin

It is my secrecy which makes you unhappy, my evasions, my silences. And so I have found a solution. Whenever you get desperate with my mysteries, my ambiguities, here is a set of Chinese puzzle boxes. You have always said that I was myself a Chinese puzzle box. When you are in the mood and I baffle your love of confidences, your love of openness, your love of sharing experiences, then open one of the boxes. And in it you will find a story, a story about me and my life. Do you like this idea? Do you think it will help us to live together? — Anais Nin

The same chemicals were used in the cooking as were used on the composition of her own being: only those which caused the most violent reaction, contradiction, and teasing, the refusal to answer questions but the love of putting them, and all the strong spices of human relationship which bore a relation to black pepper, paprika, soybean sauce, ketchup and red peppers. — Anais Nin

The truth is that this is the only way I can live: in two directions. I need two lives. I am two beings. When I return to Hugo in the evening, to the peace and warmth of the house, I return with deep contentment, as if this was the only condition for me. I bring home to Hugo a whole woman, freed of all 'possessed' fevers, cured of the poison of restlessness and curiosity which used to threaten our marriage, cured through action. Our love lives, because I live. I sustain and feed it. I am loyal to it, in my own way, which cannot be his way. If he ever reads these lines, he must believe me. I am writing calmly, lucidly while waiting for him to come home, as one waits for the chosen lover, the eternal one. — Anais Nin

Our love would be death. The embrace of imaginings. — Anais Nin

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

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. — Anais Nin

Love the great narcotic was the revealer in the alchemist's bottle rendering visible the most untraceable substances.
Love the great narcotic was the agent provocateur exposing all the secret selves to daylight. — 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

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

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. — Anais Nin

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

She was truthful, or I was the greatest dupe who ever existed. I can only believe in our ecstasy. I don't want to know, I only want to love her. — Anais Nin

The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love. — Anais Nin

To love and to labor is the sum of living. — Anais Nin

A couple was leaning over the railing, and Lillian could hear the woman say: Even if you don't mean it, just for tonight, say you love me. I won't ever remind you of it; I will not see you again, but just for tonight say you love me, say you love me. — Anais Nin

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

And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.
What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world. — Anais Nin

One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap is the most difficult to make - to part with one's faith, one's love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion. — Anais Nin

When does real love begin?
At first it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, warmth, currents of liquid fire, feast and orgies; then dreams, visions, candlelight, flowers, pictures; then images out of the past, fairy tales, stories, then pages out of a book, a poem; then laughter, then chastity.
At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love?
At first power, power, then the wound, and love, and love and fears, and the loss of the self, and the gift, and slavery. At first I ruled, loved less; then more, then slavery. Slavery to his image, his odor, the craving, the hunger, the thirst, the obsession. — Anais Nin

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

Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones. — Anais Nin

The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love. — Anais Nin

What I cannot love, I overlook. — Anais Nin