Top 380 Anaïs Nin Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

204. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

206. “I never liked the language of Henry Miller. I don’t think pornography has added to our sensual life.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

212. “Great repressions create dualities.”

— Anaïs Nin

213. “Memory is a great betrayer.”

— Anaïs Nin

214. “It is in the movements of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately.”

— Anaïs Nin

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

218. “Our love lives because I live.”

— Anaïs Nin

219. “He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity.”

— Anaïs Nin

220. “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

221. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

224. “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

225. “The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

227. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

228. “In my dreams I sleep with everybody.”

— Anaïs Nin

229. “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

230. “You marry the day you realize the human defects of your love.”

— Anaïs Nin

231. “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

232. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

233. “The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

236. “Nowhere is inhumanity more revealed than in hospitals.”

— Anaïs Nin

237. “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

238. “Anxiety is loves greatest killer.”

— Anaïs Nin

239. “He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away.”

— Anaïs Nin

240. “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

241. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

242. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

244. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

245. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

246. “Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents.”

— Anaïs Nin

247. “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!”

— Anaïs Nin

248. “Stations and airports are rehearsals for separations by death.”

— Anaïs Nin

249. “Either one fails in one’s art or in one’s life.”

— Anaïs Nin

250. “I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.”

— Anaïs Nin