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
Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Explanation
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, Failure, Goal
There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions
—Anais Nin
Topics: Freedom
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: Excitement, Joy
Dreams are necessary to life.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Dreams
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
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Writing
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should reserve it.
—Anais Nin
The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Creation, Pornography
What I cannot love, I overlook.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Friendship
To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one’s mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Change, Moving on
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
I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Friendship
When you possess light within, you see it externally.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Light
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
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: Awareness, Being Ourselves, Acceptance, Realization
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Confidence, Courage, Bravery, Life
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
And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Risk-taking
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish it’s source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Love
We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Attitude, Perception, Knowledge, Awareness, Perspective
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: Action, Dreams
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: Life, Self-Discovery
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: Risk, Pain, Courage, Self-Discovery, Growth, Discovery, Action
we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
—Anais Nin
People living deeply have no fear of death.
—Anais Nin
Topics: People, How to Live, Death, Fear, Anxiety
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Women
I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate. It was not a matter of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Luck, Confidence, Fortune
I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Fathers, Father, Family
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
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