Anaïs Nin Quotes

222 Sourced Quotes

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

Anaïs Nin
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.

Anaïs Nin
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.

Anaïs Nin
Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

Anaïs Nin
What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no drug and no alcohol to equal it.

Anaïs Nin
Convalescence. Such an utter weakness that you lie like an animal hibernating, playing possum. You float. You are adrift. Every current is stronger than you.

Anaïs Nin
To write at the same temperature at which I live I should write nothing but poetry.

Anaïs Nin
Paris-New York, the two high tension magnetic poles between life, life of the senses, of the spirit in Paris, and life in action in New York.

Anaïs Nin
Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh... without destroying that moment.

Anaïs Nin
Nothing endures unless it has first been transposed into a myth, and the great advantage of myths is that they are ladies with portable roots.

Anaïs Nin
The suppression of inner patterns in favor of patterns created by society is dangerous to us.

Anaïs Nin
Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.

Anaïs Nin
Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their mysteries and secrets, they act and pretend. I like the character of men better.

Anaïs Nin
The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.

Anaïs Nin
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

Anaïs Nin
Electric flesh arrows, a second wave of pleasure falls over the first, a third which touches every nerve end, and now the third like an electric current 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.

Anaïs Nin
It was a misunderstanding to stress the dream like quality of the novels. What I meant to stress was the interrelation between dream and life, between dream and action.

Anaïs 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.

Anaïs Nin
One does not need to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. One need not be branded by the first pattern. Once the deforming mirror is smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness; there is a possibility of joy.

Anaïs Nin
The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.

Anaïs Nin
We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth.

Anaïs Nin
He had a mania for washing and disinfecting himself. The fear of microbes played a very important part in his life.... For him the only danger came from the microbes which attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which eats into the soul.

Anaïs Nin
In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.

Anaïs Nin
For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated.

Anaïs Nin
This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men's dreams.

Anaïs Nin