Anais Nin (1903-1977) was a French-Cuban-American writer and diarist, known for her literary contributions to modern feminist literature and for her daring exploration of sexuality and sensuality in her works.
Nin was born in Neuilly, France to a Spanish-Cuban father and a French-Danish mother. She spent her childhood between Europe and the United States, and her family moved to New York City when she was 11 years old. At age 16, she began a tumultuous relationship with her father’s close friend, writer Henry Miller, which would later inspire much of her writing.
In the 1930s, Nin began keeping a diary, which she would continue to write in for the rest of her life. Her diaries were later published, starting with “The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934,” which gained widespread acclaim and popularity.
Nin’s literary career was prolific, with numerous novels, short stories, and essays published throughout her lifetime. Some of her most notable works include “Delta of Venus,” a collection of erotic short stories, and “Henry and June,” which chronicled her love affair with Henry Miller and his wife June.
Nin was also a champion of women’s rights and an advocate for the feminist movement. She was a vocal critic of societal norms and conventions, particularly those that limited women’s freedom and expression.
Anais Nin passed away in Los Angeles in 1977, but her legacy as a writer and feminist icon lives on. Her diaries, in particular, continue to be widely read and admired for their honesty, insight, and literary prowess.
1. “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
2. “Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
3. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
4. “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 naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
5. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
6. “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.”
7. “How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?”
8. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
9. “I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as 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.”
10. “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.”
11. “I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”
12. “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”
13. “I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ”idea of them.”
14. “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.”
15. “I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.”
16. “Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”
17. “The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
18. “You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… 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. Some never awaken.”
19. “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.”
20. “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.”
21. “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.”
22. “Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the 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. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she is bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child rearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to be. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment man rests inside of her.”
23. “The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”
24. “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.”
25. “From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.”
26. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
27. “I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don’t say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.”
28. “People living deeply have no fear of death.”
29. “Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
30.“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.
31. “There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”
32. “To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.”
33. “Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.”
34. “I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits”
35. “I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.”
36.“How quickly the minutes fly when you are writing to please your heart. I pity those who write for money or for fame. Money is debasing, and fame transitory and exacting. But for your own heart…Oh, what a difference!”
37. “I am resolved to write, write, and write. Nothing can turn me away from a path I have definitely set myself to follow.”
38. “I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.”
39. “I believe I could never exhaust the supply of material lying within me. The deeper I plunge, the more I discover. There is no bottom to my heart and no limit to the acrobatic feats of my imagination.”
40. “The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”
41. “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 … 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.
42. “The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.”
43. “Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying ‘You gave me the wrong key!”
44. “I didn’t have any particular gift in my twenties. I didn’t have any exceptional qualities. It was the persistence and the great love of my craft which finally became a discipline, which finally made me a craftsman and a writer.”
45. “He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.” (Delta of Venus, 1969)
46. “… You don’t write for yourself or for others. You write out of a deep inner necessity. If you are a writer, you have to write, just as you have to breathe, or if you’re a singer you have to sing.
47. “Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.”
48. “Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.”
49. “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.”
50. “Decades of writing accompanied by scant publication success is ample proof that passion was the main ingredient in her steadfast devotion to the craft. So when Nin examined the “why” of writing, it wasn’t for money, fame, or glory. Rather, it filled a need for her that was as elemental as breathing.
51. “I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, of which I can only escape by writing.”
52. “The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.”
53. “Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.”
54.“You cannot save people; you can only love them.”
55. “If you limit yourself only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.”
56. “Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul—you create suffering.”
57. “Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
58. “Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”
59. “My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.”
60. “Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.”
61. “Dreams are necessary to life.”
62. “I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”
63. “Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
64. “Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.”
65. “Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you”
66. “To withhold from living is to die … the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.”
67. “It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before… to test your limits… to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
68. “Don’t let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.”
69. “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.”
70. “Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
71. “There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.”
72. “I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.”
73. “You cannot save people. You can only love them.”
74. “We see the world as ‘we’ are, not as ‘it’ is; because it is the “I” behind the ‘eye’ that does the seeing.”
75. “We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art–we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.”
76. “Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.”
77. “I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”
78. “When you possess light within, you see it externally.”
79. “Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.”
80. “If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses”
Anais Nin
80. “You are the poet, you walk inside my dreams.”
81. “The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.”
82. “Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy.”
83. “You live out the confusions until they become clear.”
84. “Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age”
85.“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.”
86. “When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.”
87. “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.”
88. “The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.”
89. “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.”
90. “How wrong it is for woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than set out to create it herself.”
91. “Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.”
92. “Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ”
93. ” Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.”
94. “The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world, and if this lens is not clear of distortions, we cannot perceive others.”
95. “It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”
96. “We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art—we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.”
97. “If I had not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.”
98. “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.”
99. “How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities?”
100. “There is not one big, cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”