Nin Quotes

I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness.

I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.

Violence is a symptom of impotence.

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be...including our perception. Of it

Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you.

I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.

The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.

Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.

The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.

although I love a rich life, I hate an overcrowded life. I believe in rumination and lose half the beauty of all things when I am deprived of the time to ruminate.

Each friend represents a world in us.

If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses

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

What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.

In music I feel most deeply the passing of things.

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

"We see the world as 'we' are, not as 'it' is; because it is the "I" behind the 'eye' that does the seeing."

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

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.

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

I am a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough.

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

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life.

Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.

I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them.

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

It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.

Ordinary life does not interest me.

I either eat too much or starve myself. Sleep for 14 hours or have insomniac nights. Fall in love very hard or hate passionately. I don't know what grey is. I never did.

The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through.

Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.

You live out the confusions until they become clear.

The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world.

We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

One handles truths like dynamite.

it was while helping others to be free that I gained my own freedom.

The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.