Anaïs Nin > Quotes

“I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.”
― Anaïs Nin

“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.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“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.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s. ”
― Anaïs 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.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I want to make my own discoveries…….penetrate the evil which attracts me”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.”
― Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

“Do you know what I would answer to someone who asked me for a description of myself, in a hurry? This:

?? !!

For indeed my life is a perpetual question mark--my thirst for books, my observations of people, all tend to satisfy a great, overwhelming desire to know, to understand, to find an answer to a million questions. And gradually the answers are revealed, many things are explained, and above all, many things are given names and described, and my restlessness is subdued. Then I become and exclamatory person, clapping my hands to the immense surprises the world holds for me, and falling from one ecstasy into another. I have the habit of peeping and prying and listening and seeking--passionate curiosity and expectation. But I have also the habit of being surprised, the habit of being filled with wonder and satisfaction each time I stumble on some wondrous thing. The first habit could make me a philosopher or a cynic or perhaps a humorist. But the other habit destroys all the delicate foundations, and I find each day that I am still...only a Woman!”
― Anaïs Nin, The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 2: 1920-1923

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

“I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me. ”
― Anaïs Nin

“If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.”
― Anaïs 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.”
― Anaïs Nin, Fire: From "A Journal of Love" The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1934-1938

“Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I have no brakes on...analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“In chaos, there is fertility.”
― Anaïs Nin

“life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 2: 1920-1923

“Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together. ”
― Anaïs Nin

“He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.”
― Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

“There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.”
― Anaïs Nin, Journals Of Anais Nin Volume 3

“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.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Stories do not end.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”
― Anaïs Nin

“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

“This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Passion gives me moments of wholeness”
― Anaïs Nin

“It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”
― Anaïs Nin