Anaïs Nin Quotes

Do you have regrets that we were so overwhelmed? Do you ever wish to live those hours over again and differently, with more confidence.
Anaïs Nin
At five o'clock Paris always has a current of eroticism in the air.
Anaïs Nin
I'm in love with New York. It matches my mood. I'm not overwhelmed. It is the suitable scene for my ever ever heightened life. I love the proportions, the amplitude, the brilliance, the polish, the solidity. I look up at Radio City insolently and love it. It's all great, and Babylonian. Broadway at night. Cellophane. The newness. The vitality. True, it is only physical. But it's inspiring. Just bring your own contents, and you create a sparkle of the highest power. I'm not moved, not speechless. I stand straight, tough and I meet the impact. I feel the glow and the dancing in everything. The radio music in the taxis, scientific magic, which can all be used lyrically. That's my last word. Give New York to a poet. He can use it. It can be poetized. Or maybe that's mania of mine, to poetize. I live lightly, smoothly, actively, ears or eyes wide open, alert, oiled! I feel the glow and the dancing in every thing and the tempo is like that of my blood. I'm at once beyond, over and in New York, tasting it fully.
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
A war regarded as inevitable or even probable and therefore much prepared for has a very good chance of eventually being fought.
Anaïs Nin
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
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.
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
Beware of allowing a tactless word rebuttal a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.
Anaïs Nin
When one is pretending the entire body revolts.
Anaïs Nin
She lacks confidence she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.
Anaïs Nin
I postpone death by living by suffering by error by risking by giving by losing.
Anaïs Nin
I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself because it always changes me.
Anaïs Nin
She lacks confidence she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.
Anaïs Nin
I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself because it always changes me.
Anaïs Nin
I was thinking of my patients and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate they were in despair.
Anaïs Nin
What I cannot love I overlook.
Anaïs Nin
Violence is a symptom of impotence.
Anaïs 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 withering of tarnishing.
Anaïs Nin
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.
Anaïs Nin
I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.
Anaïs Nin
[Families] are made to make you forget yourself occasionally so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.
Anaïs Nin
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.
Anaïs Nin
When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.
Anaïs 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.
Anaïs 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.
Anaïs Nin
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Anaïs Nin
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.
Anaïs Nin
People living deeply have no fear of death.
Anaïs Nin
What is the greatest need of human beings? What is it they seek from me always? Intimacy. I listen with all my being, I am completely interested. I seek momentarily a full communion of eyes, feelings, thoughts.
Anaïs Nin
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.
Anaïs Nin
Later he´ll be drunk in extremis and will only be able to speak the esperanto of alcoholics, which is a language full of stutterings from the geological layers of our animal ancestors
Anaïs Nin
How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between.
Anaïs Nin
Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.
Anaïs Nin
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.
Anaïs Nin
When you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive
Anaïs Nin
She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness...A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there.
Anaïs Nin
We are punctual, a stressed, marked characteristic. We need order around us, in the house, in the life, although we live by irresistible impulses, as if the order in the closets, in our papers, in our books, in our photographs, in our souvenirs, in our clothes could preserve us from chaos in our feelings, loves, in our work. Indifference to food, sobriety; but this, we admit, is the part of the war against a threatening fragility.
Anaïs Nin
What you call your lies are fiction and myths. The art of creating a disguise can be as beautiful as the creation of a painting… I created a woman for my artist life, bold, gay, courageous, generous, fearless; and another to please my father, a clear-sighted woman with a love of beauty, harmony, and self-discipline, critical and selective; and still another who lives in chaos, embraces the weak and the stumbling and the confused.
Anaïs Nin
In chaos, there is fertility.
Anaïs Nin
I feel a little like the moon who took possession of you for a moment and then returned your soul to you. You should not love me. One ought not to love the moon. If you come too near me, I will hurt you.
Anaïs Nin
There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.
Anaïs Nin
We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.
Anaïs Nin
I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.
Anaïs Nin
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.
Anaïs Nin
We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it... We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely.
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
There are women’s voices that sound like poetic, unearthly echoes. Then they change. The eyes change. I believe that all these legends about people changing into animals at night – like the stories of the werewolf, for instance – were invented by men who saw women transformed at night – from idealized, worshipful creatures into animals and thought that they were possessed.
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 origin of illness may be in the past, but the virulent crisis must be dynamically tackled. I believe in attacking the core of the illness, through its present symptoms, quickly, directly. The past is a labyrinth. One does not have to step into it and move step by step through every turn and twist. The past reveals itself instantly, in today’s fever or abscess of the soul.
Anaïs Nin
I walked into my own book, seeking peace.It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.
Anaïs Nin
There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.
Anaïs 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...
Anaïs Nin
The relief of opening one's hand and letting go was immense. But soon after, I tightened again. A desire for revenge, a strange revenge.
Anaïs Nin
Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body’s breath, and the strings’ wails and moans are echoes of the body’s music. It is the body’s vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.
Anaïs Nin
We are dancing on our irony as upon the top of glowing sparks.
Anaïs Nin
When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts. Naked now, he lay his full length over her. She enjoyed his weight on her, enjoyed being crushed under his body. She wanted him soldered to her, from mouth to feet. Shivers passed through her body.
Anaïs Nin
Every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room.
Anaïs Nin
I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.
Anaïs Nin
Even when they did not look at each other or speak to each other, he could feel a powerful current between them.
Anaïs Nin