Anaïs Nin: Quotes about the world

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

Anaïs Nin: 556 quotes87 likes

“Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me.”

Source: The Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 1931-1934: Vol. 1

“I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have shared my kingdom with you.”

Anaïs Nin book House of Incest

Source: House of Incest

“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.”

“When I first met him, he did not care if a friend did not fit into his world, because at that time his world had not been born yet.”

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

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

March 2, 1936 Fire
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.”

May 25, 1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

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

Anaïs Nin book House of Incest

House of Incest (1936)

“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)

“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 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)

“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)

“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.”

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

“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)

“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.”

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)