Anaïs Nin Quotes

There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive.

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

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others' eyes. She does not dare to be herself.

I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.

One does not learn to suffer less but to dodge pain.

Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.

How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities?... I never feel the four walls around the substance of the self, the core. I feel only space. Illimitable space.

Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. But I am more preoccupied with loving.

My attraction to drugs is based on an immense desire to annihilate awareness.

Our age has need of violence, " he writes. And he is violence.

For our anxiety is the one thing we cannot place on the shoulders of others, it suffocates them.

I never lose sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled.

Wherever there is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me.

We are dancing on our irony as upon the top of glowing sparks.

The relief of opening one's hand and letting go was immense. But soon after, I tightened again. A desire for revenge, a strange revenge.

Do you have regrets that we were so overwhelmed? Do you ever wish to live those hours over again and differently, with more confidence.

When you're in my arms, I know you're mine. But your feet are so swift, so swift, they carry you as lightly as wings, I never know where, too fast, too fast away from me.

You are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.

In this instant of danger they realized they were each other's reason for living, and into this instant they threw their whole being.

So many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost object, a misplaced unread book, cluttering the room like an attic with discarded possessions.

And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity...

His entire body was pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could she give him to cure his doubt?

The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence.

Her presence had awakened in him a man suddenly whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in action.

No moment of charm without long roots in the past, no moment of charm is born on bare soil, a careless accident of beauty, but is the sum of great sorrows, growths, and efforts.

But love, the great narcotic, was the hothouse in which all the selves burst into their fullest bloom...

Men from the mountains always dream of the sea, and above all things I love to travel.

No privacy left. No manners.

Although I was so big, and so rough in many ways, loved hunting, fighting, horseback riding, I loved the piano above everything else...The mountain man's obsession is to get a glimpse of the sea.

What can I say Rango? What can I do to prove to you that I belong to you?

He had appointed her not only guardian angel, but a member of his ideals.

They clutch and cling and howl when I leave them, but how badly they love.

Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one...

When you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive

What I cannot love, I overlook.

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.

life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat.

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle.

Living never wore one so much as the effort not to live.

We are more severe judges of our own acts... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.

There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.

But my faith seems naive, at least today. Maybe tomorrow I can believe again.

I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

Out of worship and out of love he would let no one light the stove for her either, as if he would be the warmth and the fire to dry and warm her feet.

And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.