Anaïs Nin Quotes

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“I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love.”

“You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.”

“Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve”

“I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.”

“Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh … without destroying that moment.”

“One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.”

“Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.”

“I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.”

“He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.”

“I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.”

“I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”

“To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.”

“I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits”

“In chaos, there is fertility.”

“For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds…”

“I want to make my own discoveries……. penetrate the evil which attracts me”

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

“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.”

“Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.”

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”

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

“When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.”

“In my childhood diary I wrote: “I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much.”

“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.”

“life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat.”

“I have no brakes on… analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life.”

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.”

“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.”

“This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.”

“When one is pretending the entire body revolts.”

“I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.”

“Passion gives me moments of wholeness.”

“Stories do not end.”

“Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.”

“I'm sick of my own romanticism!”

“To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break myself. I want to live only for ecstasy. I’m neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous - lava, inflammable, unrestrained.”

“There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection.”

“The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.”

“I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored. D. H. Lawrence began to give instinct a language, he tried to escape the clinical, the scientific, which only captures what the body feels.”

“If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses”

“I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.”

“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.”