I found Anais Nin years ago and simply fell in love with her work. Reading her book Henry and June practically changed my life; every page was a new revelation. Her writings and novels are full of passion, overwhelming heart, and absolute beauty.
My list of the Best Anais Nin quotes:
She felt heightened in her own eyes, while knowing this sensation was not different from drunkenness, and that it would vanish like the ecstasies of drink, leaving her the next day even more shaky, even weaker at the core, deflated, possessing nothing within herself.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
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.
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.
Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
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.
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
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.
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.
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.
..I will comfort & console you, first of all I will gather you together again, you’re always so battered by the outside world.
She took her pattern of life from men but she was not a masculine woman. She demanded the freedom to change, to evolve, to grow. She was not a feminist at all but struggling against the feminine side of herself in order to maintain her integrity as an individual.
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.”
Life is not rational; it is just mad and full of pain.
We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate.
We decided we should not run away together. I told him sadly, “You will lose me soon because you don’t love me enough.”
I feel my past like an unbearable weight on me, like a curse, the source of every movement I make, every word I utter.
I told him a little of the storm I had been through in the past days. I felt like someone condemned to die and then suddenly paroled.
Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
I want the impossible, I want to fly all the time, I destroy ordinary life, I run towards all the dangers of love as he ran towards all the dangers of war. He runs away, war is less terrifying to him than life…
If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience and creation.
I am overflowing. I talk too much. I love too much. I want to work. I like the confusion in my head because a whirlpool of feelings confuses my mind and destroys its control. I want to live by my feelings. Artistically and humanly, they are of better quality than my analysis.
I must be a mermaid. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
Thrown into life without experience, naïve, I feel that something has saved me. I feel equal to life.
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.
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.
Please understand that I’m in full rebellion against my own mind, that when I live, I live by impulse, by emotion, by white heat.
You cannot save people, you can only love them.
I’m a neurotic in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
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.
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 I look at your face, I want to let go and share your madness, which I carry inside of me like a secret and cannot conceal any more.
Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful, and good things are.
I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women are in me.
He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.
Someday I’ll be locked up for love insanity. ‘She loved too much.’
I only feel close to people who arouse my energy, who make enormous demands of me, who are capable of enriching me with experience, pain, people who do not doubt my courage, or my toughness.
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.
Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.
Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.
