Top 380 Anaïs Nin Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

262. “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

263. “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

264. “Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

268. “Tropical nights are hammocks for lovers.”

— Anaïs Nin

269. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

270. “New York seems conducted by jazz, animated by it. It is essentially a city of rhythm.”

— Anaïs Nin

271. “The softness of the summer day like an ermine paw.”

— Anaïs Nin

272. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

273. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

274. “I believe the lasting revolution comes from deep changes in ourselves which influence our collective life.”

— Anaïs Nin

275. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

276. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

277. “Great repressions create dualities.”

— Anaïs Nin

278. “You are the poet, you walk inside my dreams...”

— Anaïs Nin

279. “My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.”

— Anaïs Nin

280. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

282. “Big Business and Politics are twins, they are the monsters who kill everything, corrupt everything.”

— Anaïs Nin

283. “Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold.”

— Anaïs Nin

284. “The core of creation is to summon an image and the power to work with the image.”

— Anaïs Nin

285. “When I am most deeply rooted, I feel the wildest desire to uproot myself.”

— Anaïs Nin

286. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

287. “You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead.”

— Anaïs Nin

288. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

289. “The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.”

— Anaïs Nin

290. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

291. “I’m sick of my own romanticism!”

— Anaïs Nin

292. “I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.”

— Anaïs Nin

293. “A war regarded as inevitable or even probable, and therefore much prepared for, has a very good chance of eventually being fought.”

— Anaïs Nin

294. “All that is sacred and taboo in the world are meaningless.”

— Anaïs Nin

295. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

296. “I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love.”

— Anaïs Nin

297. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

298. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

299. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

300. “Introspection is a devouring monster.”

— Anaïs Nin