Anais Nin

United States
21 Feb 1903 // 14 Jan 1977
Author

Quotes

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Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Incest: From a Journal of Love
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

The Diary of Ana�s Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me na�ve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays