Anais Nin Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

People living deeply have no fear of death.

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.

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

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.

Dreams are necessary to life.

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.

It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before... to test yout limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossum.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.

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.

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

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

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

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.

What I cannot love, I overlook.

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.

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

Jazz is the music of the body.

A war regarded as inevitable or even probable, and therefore much prepared for, has a very good chance of eventually being fought.

The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements.

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.

There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.

I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.