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
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Ideas
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: Growth, Action, Self-Discovery, Discovery, Courage, Risk
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
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, Friendship
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
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
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should reserve it.
—Anais Nin
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Living
We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Perception, Attitude, Awareness, Perspective, Knowledge
What I cannot love, I overlook.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Friendship
the personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
—Anais Nin
Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
—Anais Nin
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
we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
—Anais Nin
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
—Anais Nin
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Love
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