Anais Nin Quotes

Perhaps I should not tell him the dream. It puts me in his hands, it is giving him too much,

She was now afraid to yield to passion, and because she could not yield to the larger impulses it became essential also to not yield to the small ones, even if her adversary were in the right. She was...

That last afternoon in Henry's hotel room was for me like a white-hot furnace. Before, I had only white heat of the mind and of the imagination; now it is of the blood. Sacred completeness. I come out...

The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated dose of life. I said, almost indignantly, That's the danger of it, it prepares you to l...

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 ap...

To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.

We sit on the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds.

We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in modern life. That is our tragedy. Once I wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only absolute...

What can you give when there is no self, when you have no sensitivity, no receptivity, no warmth, nothing to contact others with?

You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not o...

You must not fear or hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and your feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to receive, t...

إنه الخوف من هذه الحياة الجديدة ما يستفزني أكثر مما يفعل الخوف من الموت

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.

Dreams are necessary to life.

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

I sleep with my feet on moss carpets, my branches in the cotton of the clouds.

Men can be in love with literary figures, with poetic and mythological figures, but let them meet with Artemis, with Venus, with any of the goddesses of love, and then they start hurling moral judgmen...

One does not learn to suffer less but to dodge pain.

Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer.

The city was asleep on its right side and shaking with violent nightmares. Long puffs of snoring came out of the chimneys. Its feet were sticking out because the clouds did not cover it altogether. Th...