Anais Nin Quotes. Anaïs Nin was an author born to Cuban parents in France, where she was also raised. She spent some time in Spain and Cuba but lived most of her life in the United States where she became an established author... (wikipedia)
Anais Nin Quotes
1. There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination.
2. Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.
3. Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.
4. One word I would banish from the dictionary is ‘escape.’ Just banish that and you’ll be fine.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to
learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself, and not be afraid of
fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you,
sweeps you into experience and into writing.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.
14. 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.
15. And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
16. I do not confess any more, I have no remorse, yet am I doing penance for my enjoyments?
17. I could be healed by the sheer courage of continuing to live. I could heal myself.
18. I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason.
19. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn 't impress me.
20. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
21. How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?
22. 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.
23. I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
24. We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially.
25. 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.
26. The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud. It is not madness.
It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by
the rational mind.
27. My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly
who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my
talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be
loved as I am.
28. There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our
consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then
one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes
towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.
29. Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they
must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven
together.
30. I had always believed in Andre Breton's freedom, to write as one thinks,
in the order and disorder in which one feels in thinks, to follow
sensations and absurd correlations of events and images, to trust to the
new realms they lead one into.
31. My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns,
my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations.
I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My
real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and
deep adventure.
32. And in his eyes he had the look of the cat who inspires a desire to
caress but loves no one, who never feels he must respond to the impulses
he arouses.
33. Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and
personal. They hang on to their mysteries and secrets, they act and
pretend. I like the character of men better.
34. Like the Baron, Mathilde developed a formula for acting out life as a
series of roles—that is, by saying to herself in the morning while
brushing her blond hair, 'Today I want to become this or that person',
and then proceeding to be that person.
35. People feel that in her, the nonhuman. People are afraid of her. Something in her inspires a nonhuman attachment.