Anaïs Nin: Quotes about life

Anaïs Nin was writer of novels, short stories, and erotica. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Anaïs Nin: 556 quotes87 likes

“When I cannot bear outer pressures anymore, I begin to put order in my belongings… As if unable to organize and control my life, I seek to exert this on the world of objects.”

Anaïs Nin

“Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.”

Anaïs Nin

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

“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)

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

Anaïs Nin

February, 1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

“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)

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

Anaïs Nin

February 5, 1934
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“I need a place where I can shout and weep. I have to be a Spanish savage at some time of the day. I record here the hysteria life causes in me. The overflow of an undisciplined extravagance. To hell with taste and art, with all contractions and polishings. Here I shout, I dance, I weep, I gnash my teeth, I go mad — all by myself, in bad English, in chaos. It will keep me sane for the world and for art.”

Anaïs Nin

Oct. 27, 1933 (writing about her diary)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

“Because so many of our writers were born in ugly environments, in monstrous poverty and humilitation, they continue to assert that this is the natural environment, reality, and that beauty is artifice. Why should the natural state be ugliness? Natural to whom? We may be born in ugliness, but the natural consequences should be a thirst for its opposite. To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school. A hunger for the unknown, and an aspiration towards beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial.
We are born with the power to alter what we are given at birth.
When the Japanese paint flowers or the sea on a kimono they mean to establish a link with nature. But they select only what is beautiful in nature to maintain their love of life.
The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything. That is the deepest meaning of rebellion, not the wearing of different clothes, haircuts, or the adopting of other cultures.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)