Anaïs Nin Quotes
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151. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

152. “I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life.”

— Anaïs Nin

153. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

154. “Travel is seeking the lost paradise. It is the supreme illusion of love.”

— Anaïs Nin

155. “I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.”

— Anaïs Nin

156. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

157. “Adolescence is like cactus.”

— Anaïs Nin

158. “I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated.”

— Anaïs Nin

159. “Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.”

— Anaïs Nin

160. “Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.”

— Anaïs Nin

161. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

162. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

163. “It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.”

— Anaïs Nin

164. “Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

166. “I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.”

— Anaïs Nin

167. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

168. “I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers.”

— Anaïs Nin

169. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

170. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

171. “He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.”

— Anaïs Nin

172. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

173. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

174. “There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.”

— Anaïs Nin

175. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

176. “The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.”

— Anaïs Nin

177. “Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.”

— Anaïs Nin

178. “If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses.”

— Anaïs Nin

179. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

180. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

181. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

182. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

183. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

184. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

185. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

186. “The one who travels like a lover searching for a new passion is suddenly blessed with new eyes, new ears, new senses.”

— Anaïs Nin

187. “Memory is a great betrayer.”

— Anaïs Nin

188. “Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.”

— Anaïs Nin

189. “It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it.”

— Anaïs Nin

190. “The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.”

— Anaïs Nin

191. “If you are terribly truthful, the ground will always move from under you, and you will have to shift with the constantly shifting truth.”

— Anaïs Nin

192. “The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.”

— Anaïs Nin

193. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

194. “Our love lives because I live.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

196. “Self-destructive patterns cause as much suffering as outer catastrophes.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

198. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

199. “We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.”

— Anaïs Nin

200. “Jazz is the music of the body.”

— Anaïs Nin