Top 380 Anaïs Nin Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.”

— Anaïs Nin

252. “Violence is a symptom of impotence.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

254. “Solitude may rust your words.”

— Anaïs Nin

255. “My trunk, valises and my mind are overpacked.”

— Anaïs Nin

256. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

257. “I will not be just a tourist in a world of images.”

— Anaïs Nin

258. “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?”

— Anaïs Nin

259. “I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me.”

— Anaïs Nin

260. “Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.”

— Anaïs Nin

261. “There is an ugliness in being paid for work one does not like.”

— Anaïs Nin

262. “New York has an electronic heart.”

— Anaïs Nin

263. “One may gain one truth at the expense of another.”

— Anaïs Nin

264. “The child who is uprooted begins to recognize that what he builds within himself is what will endure, what will withstand shattering experiences.”

— Anaïs Nin

265. “We sit on the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds.”

— Anaïs Nin

266. “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

267. “Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it.”

— Anaïs Nin

268. “Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.”

— Anaïs Nin

269. “A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.”

— Anaïs Nin

270. “The shell is America’s most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early.”

— Anaïs Nin

271. “I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth.”

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

273. “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

274. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

275. “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.”

— Anaïs Nin

276. “The way to recognize a dead word is that it exudes boredom.”

— Anaïs Nin

277. “Houses turn to corpses overnight when we cease to live and love in them.”

— Anaïs Nin

278. “We love best those who are, or act for us, a self we do not wish to be or act out.”

— Anaïs Nin

279. “Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it.”

— Anaïs Nin

280. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

284. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

286. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

292. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin

298. “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

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

— Anaïs Nin

300. “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