Anais Nin

Author

1903-02-21 – 1977-01-14

Anais Nin was a French-born writer and diarist who spent much of her life in the United States. She is widely known for her journals and for works including Delta of Venus.

Quotes by Anais Nin

Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
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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.
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Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
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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.
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Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
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The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
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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.
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There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
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We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
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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.
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We write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospection.
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The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
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The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
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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 witherings, of tarnishings.
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Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
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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.
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