Anais Nin Quotes

"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."

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

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

"Dreams are necessary to life."

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

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

"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."

"Good things happen to those who hustle."

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

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

"I know why familles 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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"People living deeply have no fear of death."

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

"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."

"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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