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Whereas by desiring someone who would not desire her, she could allow this fire to burn and feel: how alive I am! I am capable of desire. -- Anais Nin
Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one ... -- Anais Nin
I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving. -- Anais Nin
When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness. -- Anais Nin
The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or a woman, it's what we lack in ourselves. -- Anais Nin
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it. -- Anais Nin
We must protect the minority writers because they are the research workers of literature. They keep it alive. It has been fashionable of late to seek out and force such writers into more popular channels, to the detriment of both writer and an unprepared public. -- Anais Nin
Descendants of pigeons once fed by Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin and many other famous lovers are still being fed, and the sudden sound when they all rise together, frightened away, is like the sound of giant sails flapping. -- Anais Nin
I either eat too much or starve myself. Sleep for 14 hours or have insomniac nights. Fall in love very hard or hate passionately. I don't know what grey is. I never did. -- Anais Nin
The cynic is a coward. He foresees all barrenness so that barrenness can never surprise him. -- Anais Nin
Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment. -- Anais Nin
Love men and women not for their strength but their softness, not for their fullness but their hunger, not for their plenty but their need. -- Anais Nin
E made me understand something very important. Whether because I am a Latin, or because I am a neurotic, I have a need of gestures. I am myself expressive, demonstrative; every feeling I have takes on expression: words, gestures, signs, letters, articulateness or action. I need this in others. -- Anais Nin
But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted. -- Anais Nin
Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it. -- Anais Nin
We give to others only peripheral improvisations. The plots, and themes of the music, like the plots and themes of our life, never alchemized into words, existed only in a state of music, stirring or numbing, exalting or despairing, but never named. -- Anais Nin
She makes use of the soft of the bread for a napkin. She falls asleep at times with shoes on, on unmade beds. When a little money comes in, June buys delicacies, strawberries in the winter, caviar and bath salts. -- Anais Nin
I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman. -- Anais Nin
A couple was leaning over the railing, and Lillian could hear the woman say: Even if you don't mean it, just for tonight, say you love me. I won't ever remind you of it; I will not see you again, but just for tonight say you love me, say you love me. -- Anais Nin
I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood. -- Anais Nin
Why does a gesture, a walk, stir your blood? What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no drug and no alcohol to equal it. -- Anais Nin
Will I really be able to accept my mental loneliness? -- Anais Nin
To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living. -- Anais Nin
Lillian's recurrent dream of a ship that could not reach the water, that sailed laboriously, pushed by her with great effort, through city streets, had determined her course toward the sea, as if she would give this ship, once and for all, its proper sea bed. -- Anais Nin
Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself. -- Anais Nin
You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You will always be a part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we shared, at some moment, the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage. -- Anais Nin
I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essentially human, not intellectual. I do not understand abstract act. Only art born of love, passion, pain. -- Anais Nin
Does she know I feel immobile and fixed, lost in her? -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
There are things one reads that make you aware that you have lived nothing, felt nothing, experienced nothing up to that time. How can i begin to feel - to feel? I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me. -- Anais Nin
The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love. -- Anais Nin
The obstacle became his alibi for weakness. -- Anais Nin
Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of himself that he does not see himself in the mirror. -- Anais Nin
I have a prejudice against people with money. I have known so many, and none have escaped the corruption of power. In this I am a purist. I love people motivated by love and not by power. If you have money and power, and are motivated by love, you give it all away. -- Anais Nin
Archaeologists of the soul never return empty-handed. -- Anais Nin
Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to this poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, 'Climb! -- Anais Nin
[Y]ou have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. -- Anais Nin
Love reduces the complexity of living. It amazes me that when Henry walks towards the cafe table where I wait for him, or opens the gate to our house, the sight of him is sufficient to exult me. No letter from anyone, even in praise of my book, can stir me as much as a note from him. -- Anais Nin
The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task. -- Anais Nin
What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship? -- Anais Nin
I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. -- Anais Nin
When you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive -- Anais Nin
We cannot cure the evils of politics with politics ... -- Anais Nin
That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe. -- Anais Nin
Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy. -- Anais Nin
The love of only one man or one woman is an enclosure. -- Anais Nin
My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can't be loved as I am. -- Anais Nin
When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He's a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me. -- Anais Nin
I am caught. And he? What does he feel? I am invaded, I lose everything, my mind vacillates, I am only aware of sensation. -- Anais Nin
How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities? ... I never feel the four walls around the substance of the self, the core. I feel only space. Illimitable space. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
I have decided that if analysis is a hothouse, a hastening of wisdom and growth, nevertheless the life experience must be actually lived out and through, completely, in spite of it; everything that is lived out in the imagination is poison. -- Anais Nin
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect. -- Anais Nin
[in the]..curious way that my idealism has been mixed with my fatalism, so that I can possess the soul of a dreamer and that of a cynic at the same time ... I possess a power of magic ... [to] destroy the balance of a well-designed destiny with my diabolical mind ... -- Anais Nin
The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic. -- Anais Nin
Out of worship and out of love he would let no one light the stove for her either, as if he would be the warmth and the fire to dry and warm her feet. -- Anais Nin
They smiled at each other. His smile, even at night was dazzling; hers, too. They could scarcely distinguish anything but the brilliant smiles and the outlines of their perfect bodies. -- Anais Nin
Solitude may rust your words. -- Anais Nin
A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm. -- Anais Nin
I did not feel drawn to huxley. He was beautiful physically but again without vibrations or sensory antennae ... and I had a painful impression of a psychic blindness. With all his science and knowledge, in the mystic world he blundered. -- Anais Nin
In this instant of danger they realized they were each other's reason for living, and into this instant they threw their whole being. -- Anais Nin
We're journeying constantly, but there is always a machine and books, and your body is always close to me and the look in your eyes never changes. People are saying we will be miserable, we will regret, but we are happy, we are laughing always, we are singing. We are talking Spanish and French and -- Anais Nin
There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous. -- Anais Nin
The best way to remember a beautiful city or a beautiful painting is to eat something while you are looking at it. The flavor really helps the image to penetrate the body. It fixes it as lacquer does a drawing. -- Anais Nin
I have raged at the wall growing between myself and others. I expect intuitive, miraculous understanding, or else I'm disillusioned and don't want to struggle to make things clear. -- Anais Nin
I feel a little like the moon who took possession of you for a moment and then returned your soul to you. You should not love me. One ought not to love the moon. If you come too near me, I will hurt you. -- Anais Nin
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 -- Anais Nin
I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison. -- Anais Nin
Your strength is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same. -- Anais Nin
I am made only for passion; it is the temperature of love that I cannot endure. I am afraid, and I think it is death- everything but passion seems like death to me. Only in fever do I feel life. -- Anais Nin
For the first time, in Golconda, she had practiced Larry's choice of withdrawing if the people were not of quality. Of preferring solitude to the effort of pretending he was interested in them. -- Anais Nin
Such obsession with reaching the moon, because they had failed to reach each other, each a solitary planet! In silence, in mystery, a human being was formed, was exploded, was struck by other passing bodies, was burned, was deserted. And then it was born in the molten love of the one who cared. -- Anais Nin
Then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer. -- Anais Nin
What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again. -- Anais Nin
Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite. -- Anais Nin
It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before ... to test yout limits ... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossum. -- Anais Nin
If one's conscious life is too rigid, too regimented, then the surface may crack at times, and we are unprepared for the strange emotions or sensations we experience. -- Anais Nin
I hate men who are afraid of women's strength. -- Anais Nin
All the art of analysis consists in saying a truth only when the other person is ready for it, has been prepared for it by an organic process of gradation and evolution ... -- Anais Nin
There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do. -- Anais Nin
This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice. -- Anais Nin
A long time ago," said Michael, "I decided never to fall in love again. I have made of desire an anonymous activity." "But not to feel ... not to love ... is like dying within life, Michael. -- Anais Nin
So many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost object, a misplaced unread book, cluttering the room like an attic with discarded possessions. -- Anais Nin
Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul - you create suffering. -- Anais Nin
Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions. -- Anais Nin
I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon. -- Anais Nin
In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action. -- Anais Nin
I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from a man's and for which man's language was so inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored. -- Anais Nin
My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure. -- Anais Nin
Adolescence is like cactus. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ -- Anais Nin
One discovers that destiny can be diverted, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. Once the deforming mirror has been smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness. There is a possibility of joy. -- Anais Nin
Now the evening is beginning and I will discover a human being to court or to be courted by, an adventure with caprice and desire, and while gambling I might find love. -- Anais Nin
They courted the face on the screen, the face of translucence, the face of wax on which men found it possible to imprint the image of their fantasy. -- Anais Nin
Death from disillusion is not instantaneous, and there are no mercy killers for the disillusioned. -- Anais Nin
The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything. -- Anais Nin
I want to love you wildly. I don't want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced. -- Anais Nin
He had never seen her body so abandoned, so unconscious of all but the desire to be taken and satisfied. She bloomed under his caresses, no longer the girl but the woman already being born. -- Anais Nin
Now, his hair is white and he no longer understands anyone's need to love, for he has lost everything, not to love, but to his games of love; and when you love as a game, you lose everything, as he lost his home and wife, and now he clings to me, afraid of loss, afraid of solitude. -- Anais Nin
It was this that frightened me
the sense that behind the grande amoureuse lay concealed a little bourgeoise who wanted security in love. -- Anais Nin
I spell 'god' with a small 'g' because I do not believe in him, but I love to swear by him. -- Anais Nin
And in his eyes he had the look of the cat who inspires a desire to caress but loves no one, who never feels he must respond to the impulses he arouses. -- Anais Nin
I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern. -- Anais Nin
Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met. -- Anais Nin
Djuna concerned only with the longitude, and latitude and altitude of human beings in relation to each other. -- Anais Nin
Convalescence. Such an utter weakness that you lie like an animal hibernating, playing possum. You float. You are adrift. Every current is stronger than you. -- Anais Nin
I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate. -- Anais Nin
I am happy today. I am a tyrant. -- Anais Nin
Our love lives because I live. -- Anais Nin
The secret of life was Breath. That was what I always wanted my words to do, to Breathe. -- Anais Nin
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle. -- Anais Nin
Through love, through friendship, a heart lives more than one life ... -- Anais Nin
He had not touched me. He did not need to. His presence had affected me in such a way that I felt as if he had caressed me for a long time. -- Anais Nin
I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself. -- Anais Nin
I am like a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough. -- Anais Nin
I will not be just a tourist in a world of images. -- Anais Nin
I would tell him how he almost made us lose interest in passion by his obsession with the gestures empty of their emotions, and how we reviled him, because he almost caused us to take vows of chastity, because what he wanted us to exclude was our own aphrodisiac - poetry. -- Anais Nin
New York seems conducted by jazz, animated by it. It is essentially a city of rhythm. -- Anais Nin
For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love. -- Anais Nin
The inner and poetic illumination of his life came from me. -- Anais Nin
For I am the kind of dangerous dreamer who executes all his reveries, wishes, words, promises, plans. The wildest and the lightest. A wish for me is not a game: it's a creation. -- Anais Nin
He was jealous of her future, and she of his past. -- Anais Nin
Our psychological reality, which lies below the surface, frightens us because it endlessly surprises us and drives us in a direction which society's rules and organizations define as wrong or dangerous. -- Anais Nin
The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility. -- Anais Nin
The relief of opening one's hand and letting go was immense. But soon after, I tightened again. A desire for revenge, a strange revenge. -- Anais Nin
They had reached a perfect moment of human love. They had created a moment of perfect understanding and accord. This highest moment would now remain as point of comparison to torment them later on when all natural imperfections would disintegrate it. -- Anais Nin
I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically. -- Anais Nin
The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted. -- Anais Nin
Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key! -- Anais Nin
"We see the world as 'we' are, not as 'it' is; because it is the "I" behind the 'eye' that does the seeing." -- Anais Nin
Because he was so critical, so severe, so suspicious of her, she became secretive and lying. She would never say what she really thought. She was afraid of him. -- Anais Nin
Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky -- Anais Nin
Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky. -- Anais Nin
Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy. -- Anais Nin
We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks. -- Anais Nin
The inner chambers of the soul are like the photographer's darkroom. Like a laboratory. One cannot stay there all the time or it becomes the solitary cell of the neurotic. -- Anais Nin
Tropical nights are hammocks for lovers. -- Anais Nin
I love man as creator, lover, husband, friend, but man the father I do not trust. I do not believe in man as father. I do not trust man as father. -- Anais Nin
To escape him she had run away to the end of the world. To be free of him she had run away to places where he never went. -- Anais Nin
I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me. -- Anais Nin
He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it. -- Anais Nin
Once a month, the moonstorm. Dust in the eyes and ghosts in the veins. The blood of woman is spilling and all the strength ebbs away. -- Anais Nin
If a person continues to see only giants, it means he is still seeing the world through the eyes of a child. I have a feeling that man's fear of woman comes from having first seen her as the mother, creator of men. -- Anais Nin
When I hear of people who weary of each other, I believe it is because they have sought virtues in themselves alone, attractions of physical beauty. Have they based their love on each other's thoughts? Who can weary of thoughts which change every day? -- Anais Nin
The pearl-grey city, the opal that is Paris ... -- Anais Nin
Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home. -- Anais Nin
[On Paris:] A city never entirely known, yet which gives you the feeling of intimacy, of possessing it intimately. -- Anais Nin
A marine snail gliding through the familiar city. Only in a dream could I move so gently along with the small human heartbeat in rhythm with the tug tug heartbeat of the tugboat, and Paris unfolding, uncurling, in beautiful undulations. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
What I corrupted is what is called the truth in favour of a more marvellous world. -- Anais Nin
The shell is America's most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early. -- Anais Nin
-You know I've always wanted to break the molds which life forms around one if one lets them.
-Why?
-I want to trespass boundaries, erase all identifications, anything which fixes one permanently into one mold, one place, without hope of change. -- Anais Nin
You don't find love, it finds you. It's got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what's written in the stars. -- Anais Nin
Expressing feelings is linked directly with creation ... In this ability to tap the sources of feeling and imagination lies the secret of abundance. -- Anais Nin
what she hated above all was that most men in her presence wilted, grew small and feeble. only the timid ones approached her, as if to seek her strength. -- Anais Nin
Good things happen to those who hustle. -- Anais Nin
Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it. -- Anais Nin
These rituals Rango could not sustain, for he could not maintain the effort to arrive on time since his lifelong habit had created the opposite habit: to elude, to avoid, to disappoint every expectation of others, every commitment, every promise, every crystallization. -- Anais Nin
She walked in the shadow of Rango with a great feeling of being taken out of herself, of having no knowledge of what was happening to her, merely a pervading sense of flow. -- Anais Nin
The whole world is based on fear, even behind the jealousy of the day before lay dear. Fear of being alone, fear of being abandoned, fear of life, fear of being trapped in tragedy, fear of the animal in us, fear of one's hatred, of committing a crime, fear of cancer, of syphilis, of starvation. -- Anais Nin
I know why familles were created, with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed. -- Anais Nin
I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity. -- Anais Nin
Am discovering her pretenses. She is always smiling, gay, but underneath she feels unreal, remote, detached from experience. She acts as if she were asleep. She is trying to awaken by falling into bed with anyone who invites her. -- Anais Nin
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic. -- Anais Nin
Sexual intercourse ... a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous impaling of woman on man's sensual mast. -- Anais Nin
What is the greatest need of human beings? What is it they seek from me always? Intimacy. I listen with all my being, I am completely interested. I seek momentarily a full communion of eyes, feelings, thoughts. -- Anais Nin
At first she beckoned and lured one into her world; then, she blurred the passageways, confused all the images, as if to elude detection. -- Anais Nin
Love the great narcotic was the revealer in the alchemist's bottle rendering visible the most untraceable substances.
Love the great narcotic was the agent provocateur exposing all the secret selves to daylight. -- Anais Nin
America is the greatest humiliator in existence. It is always cultivating the power you get from humiliating others. -- Anais Nin
When we walked together through the streets, bodies close together, arm in arm, hands locked, I could not talk. We were walking over the world, over reality, into ecstasy. When she smelled my handkerchief, she inhaled me. When I clothed her beauty, I possessed her. -- Anais Nin
I will cover the walls with words. It will be la chambre des mots. -- Anais Nin
I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy
of miracles. -- Anais Nin
Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered. -- Anais Nin
When human pain has struck me fiercely, when anger has corroded me, I rise, I always rise after the crucifixion, and I am in terror of my ascensions. THE FISSURE IN REALITY. The divine departure. I fall. I fall into darkness after the collusion with pain, and after pain the divine departure. -- Anais Nin
My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea, and my eyes are the color of water. -- Anais Nin
She fell in love with an extinct volcano. -- Anais Nin
I don't hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you into me. I could stuff my ears and it would find its way into my blood and make it rise. -- Anais Nin
At five o'clock Paris always has a current of eroticism in the air. -- Anais Nin
If you can't create, you destroy. -- Anais Nin
We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in modern life. That is our tragedy. Once I wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only absolute act left to do, for what is most powerful in me is the craving for purity, greatness. -- Anais Nin
One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap is the most difficult to make - to part with one's faith, one's love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion. -- Anais Nin
The river of life divides into two branches: being and formulating. -- Anais Nin
For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue - that I had to do the job myself. -- Anais Nin
People living deeply have no fear of death. -- Anais Nin
Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime. -- Anais Nin
His theatre was the clouds, where no spectacle repeated itself. On land he was a foreigner. Land for him was stasis, and it pulled him into immobility, which was his image of death.
- , -- Anais Nin
I get furious at stairways, furious at doors, at
walls, furious at everyday life which interferes with the continuity of
ecstasy. -- Anais Nin
He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away. -- Anais Nin
I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. -- Anais Nin
Willingness to explore everything is a sign of strength. The weak ones have prejudices. Prejudices are a protection. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination. -- Anais Nin
No one should be forced to carry the unfulfilled self of another. -- Anais Nin
Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws. -- Anais Nin
Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. -- Anais Nin
I believe the lasting revolution comes from deep changes in ourselves which influence our collective life. -- Anais Nin
He failed to see that it contained at once all of Djuna's wishes which had been denied, and these wishes had flown from all directions to meet at this intersection and to plead once more for understanding. -- Anais Nin
We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds. -- Anais Nin
I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored. -- Anais Nin
The diary taught me that it is in the moments of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately. I learned to choose the heightened moments because they are the moments of revelation. -- Anais Nin
What makes some butterflies have such beautiful colors on their wings, and others not?" "The plain ones were born of parents who didn't know how to paint. -- Anais Nin
I have seen romanticism outlast the realistic. I have seen men forget the beautiful women they have possessed, forget the prostitutes, and remember the first woman they idolized, the woman they could never have. The woman who aroused them romantically holds them. -- Anais Nin
But we were lonely. we had nobody to play with. The gay child, the inventive child, the spirited and wild child, was lonely. -- Anais Nin
Snow does not freeze the hands, but like ether distends the lungs until they burst. All the ships are sinking with fire in their bowels, and there are fires hissing in the cellars of every house. -- Anais Nin
I am most deeply concerned over a trend toward conformity, a growth of anti-intellectualism, which manifests itself in a sneering attitude toward education, science, and the arts. The tendency is to stifle mental freedom, which is the very basis of a democracy's life and growth. -- Anais Nin
This great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes air, or swallows a snowflake, or yields to the sun. -- Anais Nin
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. -- Anais Nin
If I fall asleep, it is because I am overloaded. I sleep because one hour with Henry contains five years of my life, and one phrase, one caress answers the expectations of a hundred nights. When I hear him laugh, I say, "I have heard Rabelais.". And I swallow his laughter like bread and wine. -- Anais Nin
You marry the day you realize the human defects of your love. -- Anais Nin
Confront all the angry thoughts, feelings, the jealousies and condemnations, to find their cause, seek the root of such feelings and then operate on that. Need of security and reassurance can cause criminal acts. -- Anais Nin
Pleasure is an attitude, not a person or place. - Diary 6, pg. 52 -- Anais Nin
I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often. -- Anais Nin
I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama. -- Anais Nin
When I am happy it is so rare. I need to dwell on it, to contemplate it. What a hunger, a craving for beautiful things. -- Anais Nin
But what a superb game the three of us are playing. Who is the demon? Who is the liar? Who the human being? Who the cleverest? Who the strongest? Who loves the most? Are we three immense egos fighting for domination or for love, or are these things mixed? -- Anais Nin
She was truthful, or I was the greatest dupe who ever existed. I can only believe in our ecstasy. I don't want to know, I only want to love her. -- Anais Nin
Acapulco in the sunset seems like a balm; it enters the blood like a drug after one inhalation of the scent of flowers, one glimpse of the bay iridescent like silk, the sunset like the inside of a shell, so much like the flesh of Venus. -- Anais Nin
Jazz is the music of the body. -- Anais Nin
All that is sacred and taboo in the world are meaningless. -- Anais Nin
But my faith seems naive, at least today. Maybe tomorrow I can believe again. -- Anais Nin
Destruction is ultimately self-destruction. -- Anais Nin
All of my creation is an effort to weave a web of connection with the world: I am always weaving it because it was once broken. -- Anais Nin
Men from the mountains always dream of the sea, and above all things I love to travel. -- Anais Nin
There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection. -- Anais Nin
We efface an hour by passionate love, without twists, without aftertaste. When it is finished, it is not finished, we lie still in each other's arms lulled by our love, by tenderness
sensuality in which the whole being can participate. -- Anais Nin
My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living. -- Anais Nin
I walked into a white city. It was a honeycomb of ivory-white cells, streets like ribbons of old ermine. The stone and mortar were mixed with sunlight, with musk and white cotton. I passed by streets of peace lying entangled like cotton spools ... -- Anais Nin
We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them. -- Anais Nin
It is in the movements of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately. -- Anais Nin
What can you give when there is no self, when you have no sensitivity, no receptivity, no warmth, nothing to contact others with? -- Anais Nin
To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one's mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use. -- Anais Nin
I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me. -- Anais Nin
It is difficult to live with the pure. They do not condemn you; they forgive you. This forgiveness is more terrible than a judgment. -- Anais Nin
Around her hair there was a saffron aureole, and her skin was a sea shell ... -- Anais Nin
It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar. -- Anais Nin
A man fell in love with Jeanne, and she tried to love him. But she complained that he uttered such ordinary words, that he could never say the magic phrase which would open her being. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
I do not need to be a selfless child, or a woman giving to the point of self-annihilation. -- Anais Nin
I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self. -- Anais Nin
In my childhood diary I wrote: I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much. -- Anais Nin
To commit suicide is easy. To live without a god is more difficult. The drunkenness of triumph is greater than the drunkenness of sacrifice. -- Anais Nin
The real wonders of life lie in the depths. Exploring the depths for truths is the real wonder which the child and the artist know: magic and power lie in truth. -- Anais Nin
My trunk, valises and my mind are overpacked. -- Anais Nin
I smile because I listen to the OTHER and I believe the OTHER. I am a marionette pulled by the unskilled fingers, pulled apart, inharmoniously dislocated, one arm dead, the other rhapsodising in mid-air. I laugh, not when it fits into my talk, but when it fits into the undercurrents of my talk. -- Anais Nin
In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection. -- Anais Nin
The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation. -- Anais Nin
Strings of chili hung from the rafters, chili to wake them from their dreams, dreams born of scents and rhythms, and the warmth that fell from the sky like the fleeciest blanket. -- Anais Nin
The skins matched all the tones of chocolate, coffee and wood. There were many white suits and dresses, and many of those flowered dresses which in the realm of printed dresses stand in the same relation as the old paintings of flowers and fruit done by maiden aunts to a Matisse, or a Braque. -- Anais Nin
In every relationship, sooner or later, there is a court scene. Accusations, counter-accusations, a trial, a verdict. -- Anais Nin
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow. -- Anais Nin
What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life. -- Anais Nin
Will you come down and kiss me good night? -- Anais Nin
The softness of the summer day like an ermine paw. -- Anais Nin
To lie, of course, is to engender insanity. -- Anais Nin
Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives. -- Anais Nin
A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked. -- Anais Nin
Although I love a rich life, I hate an overcrowded life. I believe in rumination and lose half the beauty of all things when I am deprived of the time to ruminate. -- Anais Nin
Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you. -- Anais Nin
In music I feel most deeply the passing of things. -- Anais Nin
I loved your breaking down that door, repeated Djuna. Through Rango she had breathed some other realm she had never attained before. She had touched through his act some climate of violence she had never known before. -- Anais Nin
A war regarded as inevitable or even probable, and therefore much prepared for, has a very good chance of eventually being fought. -- Anais Nin
More damaging was his conviction that we live by a series of repetitions until the experience is solved, understood, liquidated ... -- Anais Nin
They clutch and cling and howl when I leave them, but how badly they love. -- Anais Nin
To write at the same temperature at which I live I should write nothing but poetry. -- Anais Nin
He had appointed her not only guardian angel, but a member of his ideals. -- Anais Nin
Dreams are essential to life. -- Anais Nin
But I am not sure what this self is. For the moment I seem to be busy tearing down what I was. -- Anais Nin
Lillian did not know then that the one who believes he can pay this early debt meets a bottomless well. Because the first denial has set off a fatality of revenge which no amount of giving can placate. -- Anais Nin
The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself. -- Anais Nin
Living never wore one so much as the effort not to live. -- Anais Nin
I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery. -- Anais Nin
The more hunger, the greater the desires, like those of men in prison, wild and haunting. So we had here a perfect world in which to grow the flower of eroticism. Of course, if you get too hungry, too continuously, you become a bum, a tramp. -- Anais Nin
The humiliations and defeats,
given with a primitive honesty,
end not in frustration, despair or futility,
but in hunger, an ecstatic devouring hunger - for more life.
- Anais Nin -- Anais Nin
We do not see the world as it is. We see the word as we are. -- Anais Nin
I never liked the language of Henry Miller. I don't think pornography has added to our sensual life. -- Anais Nin
The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love. -- Anais Nin
Houses turn to corpses overnight when we cease to live and love in them. -- Anais Nin
No privacy left. No manners. -- Anais Nin
I always run away from the simplest phrases because they never contain all of the truth. To me the truth is something which cannot be told in a few words, and those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning. -- Anais Nin
The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man's cult of beauty. -- Anais Nin
Coming near him like a ballet dancer she took a leap towards him, and he, frightened by her vehemence, and fearing that she would crash against him, instinctively became absolutely rigid, and she felt herself embracing a statue. -- Anais Nin
The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable, which is the lost faith. -- Anais Nin
Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved. -- Anais Nin
All through the dream there was a sense of great disorder, of movements which accomplished nothing, of everything being late, of everybody waiting, restless and defeated. -- Anais Nin
Nowhere is inhumanity more revealed than in hospitals. -- Anais Nin
Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents. -- Anais Nin
I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise. -- Anais Nin
To the woman with the least intelligence, there must come, at some time or other, the realization that housework is animal work and that there are other occupations in the world a thousand times more refined, more enriching, for which she is also suited and to which she has a right. -- Anais Nin
I never lose sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled. -- Anais Nin
My diary seems to keep me whole. -- Anais Nin
I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt. -- Anais Nin
I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream. -- Anais Nin
Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark. -- Anais Nin
I am quite wiling to confide entirely in human being, except that at some moment or another human beings get preoccupied, moody, busy, inattentive, and there come an end to the interest, and this never happens in a journal! -- Anais Nin
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. -- Anais Nin
Our love would be death. The embrace of imaginings. -- Anais Nin
Though the passivity of woman's role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? [...] Do women act thus? -- Anais Nin
He never treated her as a wife. He wooed her over and over again, with presents, flowers, new pleasures. -- Anais Nin
Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine. -- Anais Nin
The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us. -- Anais Nin
It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all. -- Anais Nin
Either one fails in one's art or in one's life. -- Anais Nin
One handles truths like dynamite. -- Anais Nin
I don't mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated -- Anais Nin
I have no fear of God, and yet fear keeps me awake at night,fear of the devil. And if I believe in the devil, I must believe in God. And if evil is abhorrent to me, I must be a saint.
Henry, save me from beatification, from the horrors of static perfection. Precipitate me into the inferno. -- Anais Nin
You are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength. -- Anais Nin
All adventurers came to grief. Perhaps they had not been able to make the transition, to alchemize the life of the mind into the life of the senses. They died when their minds were overpowered by nature, yet they did not hesitate to dilute it in alcohol. -- Anais Nin
A trite word is an overused word which has lost its identity like an old coat in a second-hand shop. The familiar grows dull and we no longer see, hear, or taste it. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
No, this was a melting together, a vanishing together into a soft, dark womb of warmth. -- Anais Nin
One does not learn to suffer less but to dodge pain. -- Anais Nin
Pain is something to master, not to wallow in. -- Anais Nin
Please understand I am in full rebellion against my own mind, that when I live, I live by impulse, by emotion, by white heat. -- Anais Nin
I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them. -- Anais Nin
I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension -- Anais Nin
Tonight I am all in flames. -- Anais Nin
You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. -- Anais Nin
I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers. -- Anais Nin
I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me. -- Anais Nin
You fall in love with people's minds. -- Anais Nin
Things aren't the way they are, they're the way you are -- Anais Nin
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. -- Anais Nin
Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it, to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: "I don't understand -- Anais Nin
Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be ... including our perception. Of it -- Anais Nin
The living out in excess kills the imagination and the intensity, -- Anais Nin
I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. -- Anais Nin
Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress my hairdresser, my make-up, it will 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. -- Anais Nin
Men recognised her always: the same effulgent face, the same rust voice. And she and I, we recognised each other; I her face and she my legend. -- Anais Nin
The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams. -- Anais Nin
We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself. -- Anais Nin
And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity... -- Anais Nin
At night too, she puzzled the mystery of her desperate need of kindness. As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a lover, or for wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently: let him be kind. -- Anais Nin
Each one of us possesses in himself a separate and distinct city, a unique city, as we possess different aspects of the same person. -- Anais Nin
I love you, June, and you know how acutely, how desperately. You know that no one can say or do anything to shake my love. I have taken you into myself, whole. You need have no fear of being unmasked, only loved. -- Anais Nin
This openness, which is closed again as soon as we face a partial relationship, the one who understands only one part of us, is the miraculous openess which takes place in whole love. -- Anais Nin
What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is. -- Anais Nin
No rest for me anywhere. No rest from writing, awareness, insights, memories, fantasies, analogies, free associations. Writing becomes imperative for a surcharged head. -- Anais Nin
She abandoned herself to his whim, thinking it was to be an orgy of eyes and hands only. -- Anais Nin
I cannot live without love. Love is at the root of my being. -- Anais Nin
When I saw you, Sabina, I chose my body. -- Anais Nin
Laughter and tears are not separate experiences, with intervals of rest: they rush out together and it is like walking with a sword between your legs. -- Anais Nin
He worked on small canvases with a touch as light as a cobweb and coloring made of mirages. He lived there, at the bottom of the sea ... -- Anais Nin
Awareness hurts. Relationships hurts. Life hurts. But to float, to drift, to live in the dream does not hurt. -- Anais Nin
To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school [of writing]. A hunger for the unknown and an aspiration toward beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial. -- Anais Nin
Malraux says art is our rebellion against man's fate.
La condition humaine is what I have never accepted. That is why I tried to create my own world. -- Anais Nin
For our anxiety is the one thing we cannot place on the shoulders of others, it suffocates them. -- Anais Nin
I am not always just living, just following all my fantasies; I come up for air, for understanding. -- Anais Nin
How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself? -- Anais Nin
All I wanted was humor and wisdom. -- Anais Nin
I palliate the sufferings of others. yes I see myself as softening the blows, dissolving acids, neutralizing poisons, every moment of the day. I try to fulfill the wishes of others, to perform miracles. I exert myself performing miracles. -- Anais Nin
I am losing my great, dissolving, disintegrating pity for others, in which I saw deflected the compassion I wanted for myself. I no longer give compassion, which means I no longer need to receive it. -- Anais Nin
Atrophy of feeling creates criminals. -- Anais Nin
I feel very small. I don't understand. I have so much courage, fire, energy, for many things, yet I get so hurt, so wounded by small things. -- Anais Nin
The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive. -- Anais Nin
I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing. -- Anais Nin
The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality. -- Anais Nin
everywhere i miss you. -- Anais Nin
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together. -- Anais Nin
Gold never comes to the dreamers - except in dreams. -- Anais Nin
Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing. -- Anais Nin
While analyzing so many people I realized the constant need of a mother, or a father, or a god (the same thing) is really immaturity. It is a childish need, a human need, but so universal that I can see how it gave birth to all religions. -- Anais Nin
Human beings place upon an object, or a person, this responsibility of being the obstacle when the obstacle lies always within one's self. -- Anais Nin
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing. -- Anais Nin
Asia discovered two remedies for the cruelty of man, art and religion. America discarded both and is drowning in hate and aggressivity. -- Anais Nin
Literature, the ultimate gift for expressing the most subtle aspects of man's thought and feeling, may not survive persecution: first by religion, then by the bourgeoisie, then by Marxism, and now by commercialism. The -- Anais Nin
This morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart. -- Anais Nin
I can only connect deeply or not at all. -- Anais Nin
The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned. -- Anais Nin
We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art
we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones. -- Anais Nin
His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that ... only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it. -- Anais Nin
The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest. -- Anais Nin
The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again. -- Anais Nin
I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me. -- Anais Nin
With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness ... something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame, annihilate him, with a pleasure never known before. -- Anais Nin
I cheat him, I deceive him, yet the world does not sink in sulphur-colored mists. Madness conquers. I can no longer put my mosaics together. I just cry and laugh. -- Anais Nin
Only love begets love. -- Anais Nin
Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality. -- Anais Nin
Doubt tortures me. There is a twist in me, my fear of interpretation. -- Anais Nin
Man is always trying to create a woman who will fill his needs, and that makes her untrue to herself. -- Anais Nin
We see things the way we are, not the way they are. -- Anais Nin
Big Business and Politics are twins, they are the monsters who kill everything, corrupt everything. -- Anais Nin
The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. -- Anais Nin
There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive. -- Anais Nin
Nothing seems true today except the death of the goldfish who used to make love at ninety kilometers an hour in the pool. The maid has given him a Christian burial. To the worms! To the worms! -- Anais Nin
Patients weep when they discover they are their own victimizers and not the victim of others. They weep when they discover they are responsible for their own suffering. -- Anais Nin
You loved a man who treated you like absinthe, half poison and half god. -- Anais Nin
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. -- Anais Nin
Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way. -- Anais Nin
Anxiety is loves greatest killer. -- Anais Nin
We see things as we are, not as they are... -- Anais Nin
The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
Passion gives me moments of wholeness -- Anais Nin
We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream. -- Anais Nin
Stories do not end. -- Anais Nin
It is hard for me to believe in continuous, sustained happiness, just as it is hard for me to believe in love. -- Anais Nin
Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry. -- Anais Nin
Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her. -- Anais Nin
Every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room. -- Anais Nin
Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you. -- Anais Nin
The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world ... -- Anais Nin
The white man had invented glasses which made objects too near or too far, cameras, telescopes, spyglasses, objects which put glass between living and vision. It was the image he sought to possess, not the texture, the living warmth, the human closeness. -- Anais Nin
We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing aggression in human beings. And when one sees in psychoanalysis hostility disappearing as people conquer their fears, one wonders if the cure is not there. -- Anais Nin
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it. -- Anais Nin
Of course, you'll defend Jay," says Rango, He was a part of your former life, of your former values. I will never be able to alter that. I want you to think as I do."
"But Rango, you couldn't respect someone who surrendered an opinion merely to please you . It would be hypocrisy. -- Anais Nin
The core of creation is to summon an image and the power to work with the image. -- Anais Nin
One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed. -- Anais Nin
But the artist persists because he has the will to create, and this is the magic power which can transform and transfigure and transpose and which will ultimately be transmitted to others. -- Anais Nin
She acquired the certainty of the expansion of time by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity of experience. -- Anais Nin
I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. -- Anais Nin
Why did I feel warmed by imperfections, discomfort, and patina?
Because intense living leaves scars, and I could not find such scars anywhere in America. Inner scars, softened, human wear and tear. -- Anais Nin
The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment. -- Anais Nin
Societies in decline have no use for visionaries. -- Anais Nin
A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion. -- Anais Nin
I'm sick of my own romanticism! -- Anais Nin
We have been poisoned by fairy tales. -- Anais Nin
He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie. -- Anais Nin
You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. -- Anais Nin
When you possess light within, you see it externally. -- Anais Nin
When life becomes too difficult, I turn to my work. I swim into a new region. -- Anais Nin
We are more severe judges of our own acts ... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts. -- Anais Nin
Men can be in love with literary figures, with poetic and mythological figures, but let them meet with Artemis, with Venus, with any of the goddesses of love, and then they start hurling moral judgments. -- Anais Nin
I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman -- Anais Nin
And the very folds of the curtains contained secrets and sighs. -- Anais Nin
I write emotional algebra. -- Anais Nin
Am I creating my own isolation? It seems to me that most of my acts are acts of integrity. So much takes place within me each day that by comparison I find a paucity, a stinginess, a silence in people which drives me to excess. -- Anais Nin
There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned, -- Anais Nin
The child who is uprooted begins to recognize that what he builds within himself is what will endure, what will withstand shattering experiences. -- Anais Nin
When one is pretending, the entire body revolts. -- Anais Nin
Her hair was full of lights -- Anais Nin
Your eyes make me shy -- Anais Nin
The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless. -- Anais Nin
Golconda remained a city where the wind was like velvet, where the sun was made of radium, and the sea as warm as a mother's womb. -- Anais Nin
Nothing endures unless it has first been transposed into a myth, and the great advantage of myths is that they are ladies with portable roots. -- Anais Nin
I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate. It was not a matter of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair. -- Anais Nin
I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals. -- Anais Nin
If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way. -- Anais Nin
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living. -- Anais Nin
Her presence had awakened in him a man suddenly whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in action. -- Anais Nin
What I cannot love, I overlook. -- Anais Nin
It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it. -- Anais Nin
No moment of charm is born on bare soil, a careless accident of beauty, but is the sum of great sorrows, growths, and efforts. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
His entire body was pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could she give him to cure his doubt? -- Anais Nin
The Frenchman, by nature, is sensuous and sensitive. He has intelligence, which makes him tired of life sooner than other kinds of men. He is not athletic: he sees the futility of the pursuit of fame; the climate at times depresses him. -- Anais Nin
He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself ... For him the only danger came from the microbes that attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which eats into the soul. -- Anais Nin
I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. -- Anais Nin
Believing in the danger which sprang from objects as well as people, which dress, which shoes, which coat demanded less of her panicked heart and body? For a costume was a challenge too, a discipline, a trap which once adopted could influence the actor. -- Anais Nin
Although I was so big, and so rough in many ways, loved hunting, fighting, horseback riding, I loved the piano above everything else...The mountain man's obsession is to get a glimpse of the sea. -- Anais Nin
Stations and airports are rehearsals for separations by death. -- Anais Nin
I was shy, withdrawn, and read obsessionally. But I never wanted to be anyone else other than me. -- Anais Nin
I would not be concerned with the secrets, the lies, the mysteries, the facts. I would be concerned with what makes them necessary. What fear. -- Anais Nin
When I don't write, I feel my world shrink. I lose my fire, my color. -- Anais Nin
We don't see things how they are, we see things the way we are. -- Anais Nin
Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their mysteries and secrets, they act and pretend. I like the character of men better. -- Anais Nin
You can't save people, you can only love them. -- Anais Nin
Our age has need of violence, he writes. And he is violence. -- Anais Nin
At sixteen, Sabina took moon baths, first of all, because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous. -- Anais Nin
Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an artist. -- Anais Nin
Just that divine understanding and unique responsiveness and clairvoyance, the match to my mind. -- Anais Nin
I am more interested in human beings than in writing, more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living than in writing. More interested in becoming a work of art than in creating one. -- Anais Nin
We are cruel when someone refuses to play the role in which we have cast him. We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us. -- Anais Nin
The two men who have done the greatest harm to the world are Christ and Columbus. Christ taught us guilt and sacrifice, to live only in the other world, and Columbus discovered America and materialism. -- Anais Nin
Was it not an act of love to impersonate the loved one? -- Anais Nin
Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity. -- Anais 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. -- Anais Nin
Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are. -- Anais Nin
The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them. -- Anais Nin
I don't want you to taint that fragile coat of astonishing colors created by my illusions, which no painter has ever been able to reproduce. Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions give them? -- Anais Nin
To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you. -- Anais Nin
What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble. -- Anais Nin
I said, If there is an explanation of the mystery, it is this: the love between women is a refuge and an escape into harmony and narcissism in place of conflict. -- Anais Nin
Saw him as a saint. His attitude silenced me. From that moment on, if he had been brought back to me dead on a stretcher, I would not have cared. He cannot hurt me any more. -- Anais Nin
Kay was showing this, exaggerating her whims- loving herself through Leila, really. -- Anais Nin
I have this weird obsession about buying books and looking at them with a smile, even if I won't read them soon. At least they are mine now. -- Anais Nin
That night Fay became a woman, making a secret of her pain, intent on saving her happiness with Albert, on showing wisdom and subtlety. -- Anais Nin
The complaints of the child in us will never cease lamenting until it is consoled, answered, understood. Only then will it lie still in us, like our fears. It will die in peace and leave us what the child leaves to the man - the sense of wonder. -- Anais Nin
All unlived emotions turn to inanity ... -- Anais Nin
Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves. -- Anais Nin
The one who travels like a lover searching for a new passion is suddenly blessed with new eyes, new ears, new senses. -- Anais Nin
Hollywood is a mirage factory ... -- Anais Nin
I put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
She is suspicious of words. She lives by her senses, by her intuition. We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds. How are you going to tell about them? -- Anais Nin
I can't let you go now. I want to go places with you; obscure little places, just to be able to say: here I came with her. -- Anais Nin
If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation. -- Anais Nin
His room was like an explorer's den, a lair of furs, the cave of a magician. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine. -- Anais Nin
Wherever there is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me. -- Anais Nin
The secret of joy is the mastery of pain. -- Anais Nin
It was as if in captivity, her brilliant plumage were losing its brilliance. She felt the metamorphosis. She knew she was moulting. -- Anais Nin
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. -- Anais Nin
Anxiety is love's greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning. -- Anais Nin
I want to make my own discoveries ... ... .penetrate the evil which attracts me -- Anais Nin
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live. -- Anais Nin
All creators are unhappy in life. All creators are absolutists. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
I am very near to madness. I imagine my isolation, and I go mad inside, a delirium of doubts and fears. -- Anais Nin
Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people's. -- Anais Nin
I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth. -- Anais Nin
In my dreams I sleep with everybody. -- Anais Nin
I would like to be naked and cover myself with cold crystal jewelry. Jewelery and perfume... -- Anais Nin
Is devotion to others a cover for the hungers and the needs of the self, of which one is ashamed? I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not virtue. It was a disguise. -- Anais Nin
Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer. -- Anais Nin
Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold. -- Anais Nin
Self-destructive patterns cause as much suffering as outer catastrophes. -- Anais Nin
You had to account for every move, arrival or exit. In the world there was a conspiracy against improvisation. It was only permitted in jazz. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. -- Anais Nin
He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity. -- Anais Nin
We sit on the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds. -- Anais Nin
words carry colors and sounds into the flesh -- Anais Nin
Every individual is representative of the whole ... and should be intimately understood, and this would give a far greater understanding of mass movements and sociology. -- Anais Nin
Perfection is static, and I am in full progress. -- Anais Nin
Fools compare... the wise enjoy. -- Anais Nin
I have no brakes on ... analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life. -- Anais Nin
New York has an electronic heart. -- Anais Nin
I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all ... -- Anais Nin
In chaos, there is fertility. -- Anais Nin
Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons. -- Anais Nin
What can I say Rango? What can I do to prove to you that I belong to you? -- Anais Nin
Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
America hates the artist. It will not admit: the artist is my soul and I want to kill off my soul. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
That last afternoon in Henry's hotel room was for me like a white-hot furnace. Before, I had only white heat of the mind and of the imagination; now it is of the blood. Sacred completeness. I come out dazed in the mellow spring evening and I think, now I would not mind dying. -- Anais Nin
There is an ugliness in being paid for work one does not like. -- Anais Nin
I have created myself a soul, big as the world, that leaks all over, and I have to keep calling for the plumber. -- Anais Nin
Jazz is the expression of America's romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force. -- Anais Nin
Memory is a great betrayer. -- Anais Nin
Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again. -- Anais Nin
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together. -- Anais Nin
His body smelled like a precious-wood forest; his hair, like sandalwood, his skin, like cedar. It was as if he had always lived among trees and plants. -- Anais Nin
I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived. -- Anais Nin
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. -- Anais Nin
I walked into my own book, seeking peace.
It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness. -- Anais Nin
My attraction to drugs is based on an immense desire to annihilate awareness. -- Anais Nin
We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization. -- Anais Nin
Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life. -- Anais Nin
To love and to labor is the sum of living. -- Anais Nin
Everything but happiness is neurosis. -- Anais Nin
I wanted to remember in order to be able to return. -- Anais Nin
I awoke at dawn, thrown up on a rock, the skeleton of a ship choked in its own sails. -- Anais Nin
Balance is not to be sought by association with others; it must exist within one's self. -- Anais Nin
You sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in spite of it, out of anything, any material given to him. The torments and hells of [crazy men], are not for you. -- Anais Nin
The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others. -- Anais Nin
I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique. -- Anais Nin
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living. -- Anais Nin
Notes fly so much farther than words. There is no other way to reach the infinite. -- Anais Nin
If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses -- Anais Nin
Do you have regrets that we were so overwhelmed? Do you ever wish to live those hours over again and differently, with more confidence. -- Anais Nin
People who want a sane, static, measurable world take the first aspect of an event or person and stick to it, with an almost self-protective obstinacy, or by a natural limitation of their imaginations. They do not indulge in either deepening or magnifying. -- Anais Nin
He observed confusion and chaos, which I call living by one's emotions instead of one's mind. -- Anais Nin
Paris-New York, the two high tension magnetic poles between life, life of the senses, of the spirit in Paris, and life in action in New York. -- Anais Nin
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. -- Anais Nin
All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished. -- Anais Nin
Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions have given them? Give me your hat. -- Anais Nin
The way to recognize a dead word is that it exudes boredom. -- Anais Nin
There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time. -- Anais Nin
What can I do to express fully what I really am? -- Anais Nin
I sleep with my feet on moss carpets, my branches in the cotton of the clouds. -- Anais Nin
We don't see people as they are. We see people as we are. -- Anais Nin
Every disconnection is death. -- Anais Nin
Ordinary life does not interest me. -- Anais Nin
Even when they did not look at each other or speak to each other, he could feel a powerful current between them. -- Anais Nin
Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death -- Anais Nin
Perhaps," said the Doctor pensively. "It may also be that you Americans are work-cultists, and work is the structure that holds you up, not the joy of pure living. -- Anais Nin
When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others. -- Anais Nin