Anaïs Nin: Living

Anaïs Nin was writer of novels, short stories, and erotica. Explore interesting quotes on living.

Anaïs Nin: 556 quotes87 likes

“I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.”

February 1954 The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 5 (1947-1955), as quoted in Woman as Writer (1978) by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, p. 38
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Context: Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

“I'm awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”

Source: Fire: From A Journal of Love - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.”

“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”

“People living deeply have no fear of death.”

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

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

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974

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

March, 1933 http://books.google.com/books?id=Ps_DtS_PFb4C&q=%22I+postpone+death+by+living+by+suffering+by+error+by+risking+by+giving+by+losing%22&pg=PT203#v=onepage <br class="br">Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

“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.”

Variant: She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others' eyes. She does not dare to be herself.
Source: Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude.”

Children of the Albatross (1947)
Context: In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.

“To withhold from living is to die … the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.”

March 6, 1936 Fire
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

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

As quoted in D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers (1996) by Leo Hamalian, p. 93

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

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“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”

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“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.”

November, 1933
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

“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.”

“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.”

“All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.”

Anaïs Nin book Under a Glass Bell

"The Mohican"
Under a Glass Bell (1944)

“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.”

“The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle.”

“How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between.”