Famous Women Quotes
The Best Anais Nin Quotes
Dec
Anais Nin quotes are fantastic. She was never shy with words and she tells it like she sees it without censorship. She is real and to the point. Below is a huge collection of her best quotes of all time.
Anias Nin Quotes
Anais nin quotes about life and living
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage~ quotes by 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.
People living deeply have no fear of death
Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite
I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits
life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living
~ Anais Nin quotes
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living
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
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
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 ecstacy. 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
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
~ Anais Nin quotes
I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it
Living never wore one so much as the effort not to live
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
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
I have no brakes on…analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life
~ Anais Nin quotes on life and living
Anais Nin quotes about writing and literature
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect
~ Anais Nin Quotes about writing
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
Stories do not end
A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it.
Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion
The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility
I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman
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 quotes
Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once
I only regret that everybody wants to deprive me of the journal, which is the only steadfast friend I have, the only one which makes my life bearable, because my happiness with human beings is so precarious, my confiding moods rare, and the least sign of non-interest is enough to silence me. In the journal I am at ease
~ Anais Nin quotes
I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing
I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live
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
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
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
I write emotional algebra
The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.
~ Anais Nin quotes about writing
Anais Nin quotes on love, relationships, sex, passion and friendship
The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.
~ Anais Nin quotes on love
I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often
Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones
The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves
You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood
I’m awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again
~ Anais Nin quotes
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 tarnishing
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
Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer
He, who had dome 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
You cannot save people. You can only love them
Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy
He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt
~ Anais Nin quotes
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age
Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
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?
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 quotes
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
At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love?
To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.
I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self
What I cannot love, I overlook
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 quotes
Love consists of not looking each other in the eye, but of looking outwardly in the same direction
~ Anais Nin quotes
Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love
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
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.”
There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.
I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman
I’m sick of my own romanticism!
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
The drug of love was no escape, for in its coils lie latent dreams of greatness which awaken when men and women fecundate each other deeply. Something is always born of man and woman lying together and exchanging the essences of their lives.
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born
~ Anais Nin quotes on friendship
I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ
How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself
Many couples, many people, are not living with real human beings, but with their ghosts. Who has not followed for years the spell of a particular tone of voice, from voice to voice, as the fetishist follows a beautiful foot, scarcely seeing the woman herself? A voice, a mouth, an eye, all stemming from the original fountain of our first desire, directing it, enslaving us, until we choose to unravel the fatal web and free ourselves.
~ Anais Nin quotes on love, sex, passion and friendship
Other Great Anais Nin quotes
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are
~ Anais Nin Quotes
We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself
Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem
Good things happen to those who hustle
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 up of layers, cells, constellations
The obstacle became his alibi for weakness
~ Anais Nin quotes
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom
There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do
I know why families were created, with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed
Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child’s blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality….I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence
I want to make my own discoveries…….penetrate the evil which attracts me
Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are
From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life
~ Anais Nin quotes
There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.
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
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together
~ Anais Nin quotes
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
I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength
Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves
The secret of joy is the mastery of pain
Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery
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
You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you’re not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn’t a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now
I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman
I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison
Societies in decline have no use for visionaries
What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it
Passion gives me moments of wholeness
What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements
~ Anais Nin quotes
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them
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
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle
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
~ Anais Nin quotes
Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s
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.
~ Read more new years quotes and sayings
Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness
When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others
When one is pretending, the entire body revolts
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 quotes
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
His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that…only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it
If a person continues to see giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child
~ Anais Nin quotes
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
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons
~ Anais Nin quotes
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
All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished
I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it
To commit suicide is easy. To live without a god is more difficult. The drunkenness of triumph is greater than the drunkenness of sacrifice
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 have no fear of God, and yet fear keeps me awake at night, fear of the devil. And if I believe in the devil, I must believe in God. And if evil is abhorrent to me, I must be a saint.
My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea, and my eyes are the color of water
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
The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation
I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern
One discovers that destiny can be diverted, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. Once the deforming mirror has been smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness. There is a possibility of joy
~ Anais Nin quotes
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