Anais Nin

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.

Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous, I let go.

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 witherings of tarnishings.

We travel, some of us forever to seek other states other lives other souls.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Each friend represents a world in us a world not born until they arrive and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants rather than to create it herself.

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again, and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

I postpone death by living by suffering by error by risking by giving by losing.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination as I try to do.

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.

Good things happen to those who hustle.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all there is only the meaning we each give to our life an individual meaning an individual plot like an individual novel a book for each person.

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.

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.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Each contact with a human being is so rare so precious one should preserve it.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

Our life is composed greatly from dreams from the unconscious and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

Do not seek the because - in love there is no because no reason no explanation no solutions.

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.

We don't see things as they are we see them as we are.

If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.

It's all right for a woman to be above all human. I am a woman first of all.

When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say but what we are unable to say.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up to live for a moment in unison with it that was the miracle.

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.

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.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer lose endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

Age does not protect you from love. But love to some extent protects you from age.

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images just watching images passing by which I cannot live in make love to possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

Dreams are necessary to life.

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.

The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human as man who created a child and then by his absence left the child fatherless and then Godless.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

What I cannot love I overlook. Is that real friendship?

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.