Anais nin quotes

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

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.

Dreams are necessary to life.

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

I find that life, day by day, is composed of at least one joy, one problem and one sorrow. Then there are the smaller ingredients: you always learn something, whether useful or harmful - that is difficult to analyze until later; you always give something; you alwayou always grow a little in one direction or another.

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

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.

I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced.

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.

I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.

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

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.

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

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.

It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it.

I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me.

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

People living deeply have no fear of death.

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

You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You will always be a part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we shared, at some moment, the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.

To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.

We see things the way we are, not the way they are.

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

The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.

When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness.

Love men and women not for their strength but their softness, not for their fullness but their hunger, not for their plenty but their need.

I don't hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you into me. I could stuff my ears and it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.

The child who is uprooted begins to recognize that what he builds within himself is what will endure, what will withstand shattering experiences.

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

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

We cannot cure the evils of politics with politics.

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.

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.

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

Things aren't the way they are, they're the way you are

Good things happen to those who hustle.

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.

You cannot save people. You can only love them.

Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go.

That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe.

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.

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

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

My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure.

I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.

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

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.

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

Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.

Your eyes make me shy

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source.

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

To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one's mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.

Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.

We do not see the world as it is. We see the word as we are.

What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.

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

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

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

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

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

You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.

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.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Through love, through friendship, a heart lives more than one life.

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.

You live out the confusions until they become clear.

Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.

The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.

Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.

We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks.

For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love.

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

Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

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

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

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

I don't wish power, only art -art and passion.

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

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

Write. Write until it stops hurting.

The secret of life was Breath. That was what I always wanted my words to do, to Breathe.

The obstacle became his alibi for weakness.

willingness to explore everything is a sign of strength. The weak ones have prejudices. Prejudices are a protection.

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

We are never trapped unless we choose to be.

We have been poisoned by fairy tales.

Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul—you create suffering.

In chaos, there is fertility.

I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated

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.

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

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.

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

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

Violence is a symptom of impotence.

When you possess light within, you see it externally.

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.

You fall in love with people's minds.

No one should be forced to carry the unfulfilled self of another.

With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness... something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame, annihilate him, with a pleasure never known before.

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 love your silences, they are like mine.

The real wonders of life lie in the depths. Exploring the depths for truths is the real wonder which the child and the artist know: magic and power lie in truth.

Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy.

The risk it takes to remain tight inside the bud is more painful than the risk it takes to blossom. We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

You are the poet, you walk inside my dreams.

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.

The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.

Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

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

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.

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

Perfection is static, And I am in full progress.