Anais Nin Quotes

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

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

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Truth is something which can’t be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

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.

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

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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