Quotes By Anais Nin

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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