The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Writing
People living deeply have no fear of death.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Anxiety, Fear, Death, How to Live, People
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
Electric flesh-arrows… traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Sex
We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Perspective, Attitude, Awareness, Perception, Knowledge
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
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: Fortune, Luck, Confidence
we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
—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
Topics: Discovery, Action, Growth, Pain, Courage, Self-Discovery, Risk
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
the personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
—Anais Nin
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
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: Knowledge, Happiness, Absence
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
Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Women
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
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its 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
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Risk, Danger
What I cannot love, I overlook.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Friendship
He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Gift
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
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Religion, 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: Realization, Being Ourselves, Acceptance, Awareness
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, Goal, Space, Failure
One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap is the most difficult to make—to part with one’s faith, one’s love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Moving on, Reflection, Past, Life, Change
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
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
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
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Isabel Allende Chilean Novelist
- Ellen DeGeneres American Comedian, Television Host
- Joyce Maynard American Novelist
- Marguerite Duras French Novelist, Playwright
- Sylvia Plath American Poet, Novelist
- Henry David Thoreau American Philosopher
- Marie Dressler American-Canadian Actress
- Rene Dubos French Microbiologist, Chemist
- Annie Dillard American Writer
- Maya Angelou American Poet
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