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Anaïs Nin

101 quotes

“The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)
“He left me at my hotel at 3:00 AM murmuring: "You're marvelous.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)
“I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: February 5, 1934
“Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: May 30, 1934
“No one but a woman in love ever sees the maximum of men's greatness .”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: June 18, 1934
“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. 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.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: July 7, 1934
“Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Oct. 21, 1934
“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 of layers, cells, constellations.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 4 (1971); as quoted in Journal of Phenomenological Psychology Vol. 15 (1984)
“In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: May 11, 1935, published in Fire : From "A Journal of Love" : the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937 (1995)
“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 (1903–1977) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: June, 1935
“Everything but happiness is neurosis.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Feb. 15, 1936
“Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Feb. 15, 1936
“No desire of the body, but for what lies in there, what lies in the flesh, the world, the thought, the creation, the illumination.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: March 2, 1936 Fire
“To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: March 6, 1936 Fire
“I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: June 5, 1936 Fire
“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 (1903–1977) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: August 22, 1936 Fire
“Ecstasy is the moment of exaltation from wholeness!”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: September 10, 1936
“Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: October 18, 1936 Fire
“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.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: March 1937
“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.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Fall 1943
“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. 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.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: February 1947 The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 4 (1944-1947), p. 185
“Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: February 1954 The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 5 (1947-1955), as quoted in Woman as Writer (1978) by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, p. 38
“One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed. But paradoxically, we create fiction out of human concern for the victims of the revelations. This concern is at the root of literature.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5, as quoted in Moving to Antarctica : An Anthology of Women's Writing (1975) by Margaret Kaminski
“I would say that compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At a lecture I am asked to pronounce my name three times. I try to be slow and emphatic, "Anaïs — Anaïs — Anaïs. You just say "Anna" and then add "ees," with the accent on the "ees.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Summer 1966, in The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume 7 (1966-1974)
“All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am the one who has felt most deeply the stuttering of the tongue in its relation to thought.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When she did finally fall asleep it was the restless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At night too, she puzzled the mystery of her desperate need of kindness. As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a lover, or for wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently: let him be kind.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The dream has to be translated into reality.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most fiction writers uses dreams decoratively without relating them to daily life, but the contemporary writer is becoming more expert at detecting the influence of one upon the other.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The dream, scrutinized by scientists in various experiments, has been found to be an absolute necessity to man.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The hallucinatory drugs only reveal the world of images we contain but do not teach us interpretation, illumination, or enlightenment.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By shutting out the outside world, drugs place one not only in confrontation with the dreaming self, but also ones nightmares.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and to art.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that natural truths will cease to be spat at us like insults, that aesthetics will once more be linked with ethics, and that people will become aware that in casting out aesthetics that they also cast out a respect for human life, a respect for creation, a respect for spiritual values. Aesthetics was an expression of man's need to be in love with his world. The cult of ugliness is a regression. It destroys our appetite, our love for our world.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a misunderstanding to stress the dream like quality of the novels. What I meant to stress was the interrelation between dream and life, between dream and action.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Neurosis was caused by our attempt to separate physical and metaphysical levels, to set them up in opposition to each other, thus engaging in an internecine war. If it is true that we do live on several levels simultaneously- drama and action, past and present, personal and collective- we are given ways to unify them: one by religion, the other by art. Separating such levels is only necessary when they conflict, and separation is a result of conflict. Seeing how these levels can work together in harmony is the task of our contemporary writers.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The necessity for fiction was probably born of the problem of taboo on certain revelations. It was not only a need of the imagination but an answer to the limitations placed on portrayal of others.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume One 1931-1934
“Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which he has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, and act of birth and rebirth, of child bearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for a woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: May 25, 1932
“The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it. He hopes to impose his particular vision and share it with others. And when the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others. We also write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing, as the primitives dance their rituals. 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. When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: February 1954 The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5 as quoted in Woman as Writer (1978) by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, p. 38
“I feel a fatigue of the tongue seeking to utter impossible things until it twists itself into a knot and chokes me. I feel a fatigue at this mass of nerves seeking to uphold a world that is falling apart. I feel a fatigue at feeling, at the fervor of my dreams, the fever of my thought, the intensity of my hallucinations. A fatigue at the sufferings of others and my own. I feel my own blood thundering inside of me, I feel the horror of falling into abysms. But you and I would always fall together and I would not be afraid. We would fall into abysms, but you would carry your phosphorescences to the very bottom of the abysms. We could fall together and ascend together, far into space. I was always exhausted by my dreams, not because of the dreams, but because of the fear of not being able to return. I do not need to return. I will find you everywhere. You alone can go wherever I go, into the same mysterious regions. You too know the language of the nerves. You will always know what I am saying even if I do not.”
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source