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
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
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Growth, Religion
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Risk, Danger
He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Gift
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
People living deeply have no fear of death.
—Anais Nin
Topics: People, Fear, Anxiety, How to Live, Death
What I cannot love, I overlook.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Friendship
When you possess light within, you see it externally.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Light
Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Explanation
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
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: Friends, Friend, Friendship, Love
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: Acceptance, Realization, Awareness, Being Ourselves
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 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
Dreams are necessary to life.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Dreams
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, Action, Pain, Discovery, Growth, Courage, Self-Discovery
Jazz is the music of the body
—Anais Nin
Topics: Jazz
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Courage, Confidence, Life, Bravery
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Living
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
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Conscience, Action
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
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should reserve it.
—Anais Nin
we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
—Anais Nin
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: Reflection, Life, Change, Past, Moving on
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
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
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