Curated Quotes

The 58 Best Anais Nin Quotes

Tammy Lamoureux from lamourfoto.com

Here we have a curated collection of the best Anais Nin quotes.

These quotes, presented without context, paint the picture of a deeply cultured writer, thinker, and lover. Known for her diaries and erotic novels, Anais shows us that love is both romantic and primal.

Ordinary life does not interest me.

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You cannot save people. You can only love them.

Good things happen to those who hustle.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

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

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

You don’t find love, it finds you. It’s got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what’s written in the stars.

When one is pretending the entire body revolts.

Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.

Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.

We are going to the moon—that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.

Dreams are necessary to life.

In chaos, there is fertility.

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

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I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

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

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish it’s source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

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

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

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

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

When you possess light within, you see it externally.

There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.

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Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.

It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.

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.

There is no bleaker moment in life of the city than that one which crosses the boundary lines between those who have not slept all night and those who are going to work. It was for Sabina as if two races of men and women lived on earth, the night people and the day people, never meeting face to face except at this moment.

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.

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

People living deeply have no fear of death.

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.

What I cannot love, I overlook.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

I love your silences, they are like mine.

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.

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

Your eyes make me shy.

I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.

One handles truths like dynamite.

Don’t let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.

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

Solitude may rust your words.

The obstacle became his alibi for weakness.

Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.

I write emotional algebra.

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

I know why families 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.

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.

I don’t wish power, only art —art and passion.

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