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Anaïs Nin Quotes
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Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell , known professionally as Anaïs Nin, was an American essayist and diarist. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin was the daughter of composer Joaquín Nin and Rosa Culmell, a classically-trained singer. Nin spent some time in Spain and Cuba, but lived most of her life in the United States, where she became an established author.

Beginning at age eleven, Nin prolifically wrote journals throughout her life, which spanned over sixty years up until her death. Her journals, many of which received publication during her life, detail her private thoughts and personal relationships, as well as detail surrounding the sexual abuse and incestuous relationship she had with her father. Also in her journals are details regarding her marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, as well as her numerous affairs, including with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller, both of whom had a profound influence on her and her writing.

In addition to her journals, Nin wrote several novels, critical studies, essays, short stories, and several volumes of erotica. Much of her work, including the erotica collections Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published posthumously amidst renewed critical interest in her and her work. Nin spent her later life in Los Angeles, California, where she died of cervical cancer in 1977.



✵ 21. February 1903 – 14. January 1977   •   Other names Anais Ninová
Anaïs Nin photo
Anaïs Nin: 278   quotes 87   likes

Anaïs Nin Quotes

“The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.”

Anaïs Nin

July 1932 http://books.google.com/books?id=Ps_DtS_PFb4C&q=%22The+basis+of+insincerity+is+the+idealized+image+we+hold+of+ourselves+and+wish+to+impose+on+others%22&pg=PT141#v=onepage, The Diary Of Anaïs Nin, Volume One (1931-1934)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

“You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this.”

Anaïs Nin book A Spy in the House of Love

A Spy in the House of Love (1954)

Love , Personality

“I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes.”

Anaïs Nin

August 1932 Henry and June
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Soul , Parting

“Neurosis was caused by our attempt to separate physical and metaphysical levels, to set them up in opposition to each other, thus engaging in an internecine war. If it is true that we do live on several levels simultaneously- drama and action, past and present, personal and collective- we are given ways to unify them: one by religion, the other by art. Separating such levels is only necessary when they conflict, and separation is a result of conflict. Seeing how these levels can work together in harmony is the task of our contemporary writers.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

War , Religion , Art , Way

“Someday I'll be locked up for love insanity. "She loved too much."”

Anaïs Nin

The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Love

“Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.”

Anaïs Nin

Feb. 15, 1936
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Life

“The dream, scrutinized by scientists in various experiments, has been found to be an absolute necessity to man.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Dreams

“Love reduces the complexity of living.”

Anaïs Nin

June 1932 Henry and June
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Love

“I am the one who has felt most deeply the stuttering of the tongue in its relation to thought.”

Anaïs Nin book Under a Glass Bell

"Je suis le plus malade des Surrealistes"
Under a Glass Bell (1944)

“In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.”

Anaïs Nin

May 11, 1935, published in Fire : From "A Journal of Love" : the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937 (1995)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Perfection

“No desire of the body, but for what lies in there, what lies in the flesh, the world, the thought, the creation, the illumination.”

Anaïs Nin

March 2, 1936 Fire
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

World

“It was a misunderstanding to stress the dream like quality of the novels. What I meant to stress was the interrelation between dream and life, between dream and action.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Life , Dreams

“The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

“Electric flesh-arrows traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.”

Anaïs Nin

As quoted in French Writers of the Past (2000) by Carol A. Dingle, p. 126

Music , Color

“Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.”

Anaïs Nin

June 1932 Henry and June
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Women , Beauty , Shoe , Way

“My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.”

Anaïs Nin

February, 1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Life , Understanding

“If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other, if only I could save you all from yourselves.”

Anaïs Nin book House of Incest

House of Incest (1936)

Love , Housing

“There will never be darkness because in both of us there's always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection has been a still experience…”

Anaïs Nin

August 1932 Henry and June
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

“Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which he has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, and act of birth and rebirth, of child bearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for a woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her.”

Anaïs Nin

May 25, 1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Love , Pleasure , World , Art

“To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.”

Anaïs Nin

August 1932 Henry and June
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Lie

“He was insane with anger. Or is all insanity anger?”

Anaïs Nin

The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Anger

“Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and to art.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Life , Religion , Art

“No one but a woman in love ever sees the maximum of men's greatness.”

Anaïs Nin

June 18, 1934
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Love , Men

“When she did finally fall asleep it was the restless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.”

Anaïs Nin book A Spy in the House of Love

A Spy in the House of Love (1954)

Sleep , Time , Cheating , Night

“Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a worldly way.”

Anaïs Nin

June 1932 Henry and June
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Way , Imagination , Perfection

“For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Way , Reality

“I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.”

Anaïs Nin

February 5, 1934
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Life

“Most fiction writers uses dreams decoratively without relating them to daily life, but the contemporary writer is becoming more expert at detecting the influence of one upon the other.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Life , Dreams

“Solitude may rust your words.”

Anaïs Nin book Collages (novel)

Collages (1964), p. 116

Solitude

“We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Dreams , Reality

“Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.”

Anaïs Nin book House of Incest

House of Incest (1936)

World

“The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

World , Personality

“Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!”

Anaïs Nin

Oct. 21, 1934
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Love , Life , Art , Singing

“The times in his studio when he washed his hands and they smoked, for his hands were so warm and the water so cold.”

Anaïs Nin

The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Water , Time

“I think that natural truths will cease to be spat at us like insults, that aesthetics will once more be linked with ethics, and that people will become aware that in casting out aesthetics that they also cast out a respect for human life, a respect for creation, a respect for spiritual values. Aesthetics was an expression of man's need to be in love with his world. The cult of ugliness is a regression. It destroys our appetite, our love for our world.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Love , Life , People , Truth

“I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.”

Anaïs Nin

The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Sense , Strong

“I feel a fatigue of the tongue seeking to utter impossible things until it twists itself into a knot and chokes me. I feel a fatigue at this mass of nerves seeking to uphold a world that is falling apart. I feel a fatigue at feeling, at the fervor of my dreams, the fever of my thought, the intensity of my hallucinations. A fatigue at the sufferings of others and my own. I feel my own blood thundering inside of me, I feel the horror of falling into abysms. But you and I would always fall together and I would not be afraid. We would fall into abysms, but you would carry your phosphorescences to the very bottom of the abysms. We could fall together and ascend together, far into space. I was always exhausted by my dreams, not because of the dreams, but because of the fear of not being able to return. I do not need to return. I will find you everywhere. You alone can go wherever I go, into the same mysterious regions. You too know the language of the nerves. You will always know what I am saying even if I do not.”

Anaïs Nin book Under a Glass Bell

"Je suis le plus malade des Surrealistes"
Under a Glass Bell (1944)

World , Fear , Dreams , Feeling

“Ecstasy is the moment of exaltation from wholeness!”

Anaïs Nin

September 10, 1936
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

“This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men’s dreams.”

Anaïs Nin

Children of the Albatross (1947)

Women , Men , Dreams

“By shutting out the outside world, drugs place one not only in confrontation with the dreaming self, but also ones nightmares.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

World , Dreams

“I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.”

Anaïs Nin

August 22, 1936 Fire
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

World

“The hallucinatory drugs only reveal the world of images we contain but do not teach us interpretation, illumination, or enlightenment.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

World

“I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique.”

Anaïs Nin

June 5, 1936 Fire
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Idea

“Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.”

Anaïs Nin

As quoted in Sunbeams : A Book of Quotations (1990) by Sy Safransky, p. 137

Art

“The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.”

Anaïs Nin

As quoted in French Writers of the Past (2000) by Carol A. Dingle, p. 127

“I would say that compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.”

Anaïs Nin book The Diary of Anaïs Nin

The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Parent

“He left me at my hotel at 3:00 AM murmuring: "You're marvelous."”

Anaïs Nin

The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

“I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth.”

Anaïs Nin

June, 1935
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Animals