Anaïs Nin Quotes
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201. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

202. “No one should be forced to carry the unfulfilled self of another.”

— Anaïs Nin

203. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

204. “I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived.”

— Anaïs Nin

205. “When I don’t write, I feel my world shrink. I lose my fire, my color.”

— Anaïs Nin

206. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

207. “The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.”

— Anaïs Nin

208. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

209. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

210. “Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.”

— Anaïs Nin

211. “The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.”

— Anaïs Nin

212. “Now that I am moving, I am afraid. Where am I going?”

— Anaïs Nin

213. “It is difficult to live with the pure. They do not condemn you; they forgive you. This forgiveness is more terrible than a judgment.”

— Anaïs Nin

214. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

215. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

216. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

217. “I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously.”

— Anaïs Nin

218. “I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason.”

— Anaïs Nin

219. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

221. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

222. “Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.”

— Anaïs Nin

223. “To love and to labor is the sum of living.”

— Anaïs Nin

224. “Death from disillusion is not instantaneous, and there are no mercy killers for the disillusioned.”

— Anaïs Nin

225. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

226. “We are never trapped unless we choose to be.”

— Anaïs Nin

227. “The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation.”

— Anaïs Nin

228. “I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness.”

— Anaïs Nin

229. “Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate. I hate murderously.”

— Anaïs Nin

230. “The bed must be a beautiful place, not only because you make love there but because you dream there as well.”

— Anaïs Nin

231. “I love my mystery, I love the abstract world I live in, the delicate, profound, vague, obscure, voluptuously, wordless sensations I experience.”

— Anaïs Nin

232. “The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.”

— Anaïs Nin

233. “To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.”

— Anaïs Nin

234. “I spell ‘god’ with a small ‘g’ because I do not believe in him, but I love to swear by him.”

— Anaïs Nin

235. “Will you come down and kiss me good night?”

— Anaïs Nin

236. “We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.”

— Anaïs Nin

237. “Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.”

— Anaïs Nin

238. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

239. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

240. “You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.”

— Anaïs Nin

241. “We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.”

— Anaïs Nin

242. “The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.”

— Anaïs Nin

243. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

244. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

245. “Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death.”

— Anaïs Nin

246. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

247. “I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.”

— Anaïs Nin

248. “He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.”

— Anaïs Nin

249. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

250. “I sleep with my feet on moss carpets, my branches in the cotton of the clouds.”

— Anaïs Nin