Anais Nin

A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.

Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death

The cynic is a coward. He foresees all barrenness so that barrenness can never surprise him.

Travel is seeking the lost paradise. It is the supreme illusion of love.

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.

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.

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.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Life is a full circle widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

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

Dreams are necessary to life.

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

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.

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.

Solitude may rust your words.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

We efface an hour by passionate love, without twists, without aftertaste. When it is finished, it is not finished, we lie still in each other's arms lulled by our love, by tenderness -- sensuality in which the whole being can participate.

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

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.

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

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

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

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.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.

How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants rather than to create it herself

We don t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

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.

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

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Your eyes make me shy.

Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to ones courage.

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.

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

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

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.

The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.

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

Good things come to those who hustle.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

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

Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

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.

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

It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

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 naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

Tropical nights are hammocks for lovers.

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.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer lose endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

Ecstasy is the moment of exaltation from wholeness!

Death from disillusion is not instantaneous and there are no mercy killers for the disillusioned.

When one is pretending the entire body revolts.

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 nave or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.

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.

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.

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. 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.

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

Adolescence is like cactus.

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.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Self-destructive patterns cause as much suffering as outer catastrophes.

Good things happen to those who hustle.

Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous, I let go.

Life religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for artist or art. Everyone is an artist.

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.