Anais Nin quotes page 1

Anais Nin led a tremendously interesting life, a life that began when she was born to Spanish/Cuban parents in France way back in 1903. Her father once a pianist and composer while her mother was a classically trained singer, and together the two of them helped to nurture and develop the incredible artistic and creative talents that their daughter enjoyed all the way up until her death in 1977. Spending the overwhelming majority of her childhood in France (jumping from one home to the next) until she found her way to New York City, she gave up the traditional schooling route by the time she had blown out her 16th birthday candles and jumped headfirst into the world of modeling. Known mostly for really developing her artistic voice as a journalist who wrote in the "diary style," her work spanned multiple decades. Though it was almost always written in English (she had all but completely forgotten how to speak Spanish, but remained fluent in French), her writings were almost shocking at the time because of the focus on female erotica. A considerable amount of her work was based off of experiences that she had, and her first two books (written in a journalistic style) describe the incestuous relationship that she had with her father. Even though her work was well regarded almost since the first day that it was published, it wasn't until the feminist movement in the 1960s that she really gained a dedicated and almost hard-core following – a following that continues to this day.

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

Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage.
Anais Nin

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.
Anais Nin

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.
Anais Nin

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

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

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.
Anais Nin

It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before. To test your
limits. To break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight
inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin

My diary is a mirror telling the story of a dreamer who, a long long time ago went through life
the way one reads a book.
Anais Nin

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

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

Passion gives me moments of wholeness.
Anais Nin

Love consists of not looking each other in the eye, but of looking outwardly in the same
direction.
Anais Nin

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

Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.
Anais Nin

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new
word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.
Anais Nin

What I cannot love, I overlook.
Anais Nin

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.
Anais Nin

Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.
Anais Nin

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.
Anais Nin

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.
Anais Nin

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.
Anais Nin

I have no brakes on - analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life.
Anais Nin

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always
punished.
Anais Nin

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.
Anais Nin

I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.
Anais Nin

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought
into connection with action. They must be woven together.
Anais Nin

The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.
Anais Nin

The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns
itself to anything.
Anais Nin

People living deeply have no fear of death.
Anais Nin

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!"
Anais Nin

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
Anais Nin

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.
Anais Nin

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

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