Anaïs Nin (1903–77,) fully Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, was a French-born American novelist, diarist, and artist.
Born in Neuilly, France, Nin studied psychoanalysis and was a patient of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Influenced by the erotica of Surrealism in the 1930s, she wrote the novel House of Incest (1936,) the five-volume novel sequence Cities of the Interior (1947–54,) and erotica in Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979.)
Nin wrote in obscurity for much of her life. Her writing went mostly unappreciated outside her artistic circle. Her anonymity changed when her introspective diaries started to be published in 1966.
Nin’s autobiographical seven-volume The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1966–80) portrayed the development of a female artistic self in the twentieth century. Her diaries struck a chord with readers during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and elevated her to the status of a cult figure.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Anais Nin
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Life
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Bravery, Confidence, Courage, Life
He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Gift
She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Acceptance, Awareness, Being Ourselves, Realization
I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life. Les Jeux.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Belief
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
Topics: Planning, Space, Goal, Failure
I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Risk
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should reserve it.
—Anais Nin
People living deeply have no fear of death.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Anxiety, People, Death, How to Live, Fear
A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked…
—Anais Nin
Topics: Joy, Excitement
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
Topics: Love, Friends, Friendship, Friend
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
Topics: Self-Discovery, Growth, Action, Discovery, Courage, Risk, Pain
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Risk, Danger
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
Topics: Anxiety
Truth is something which can’t be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Truth
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Love
When you possess light within, you see it externally.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Light
Jazz is the music of the body
—Anais Nin
Topics: Jazz
Our psychological reality, which lies below the surface, frightens us because it endlessly surprises us and drives us in a direction which society’s rules and organizations define as wrong or dangerous.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Individuality
If … happiness is the absence of fever then I will never know happiness. For I am posessed by a fever for knowledge, experience and creation.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Happiness, Absence, Knowledge
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Ideas
the personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
—Anais Nin
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Living
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Action
I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Father, Family, Fathers
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Dreams, Action
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Growth, Religion
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Self-Discovery, Life
Dreams are necessary to life.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Dreams
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 up of layers, cells, constellations.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Growth
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