Anaïs Nin Quotes

222 Sourced Quotes

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

Anaïs Nin
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 of layers, cells, constellations.

Anaïs Nin
The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves.

Anaïs Nin
Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.

Anaïs Nin
I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.

Anaïs Nin
The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.

Anaïs Nin
When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts. Naked now, he lay his full length over her. She enjoyed his weight on her, enjoyed being crushed under his body. She wanted him soldered to her, from mouth to feet. Shivers passed through her body.

Anaïs Nin
The shell is America's most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early.

Anaïs Nin
Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

Anaïs Nin
My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.

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

Anaïs Nin
Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.

Anaïs Nin
All elegant women have acquired a technique of weeping which has no…fatal effect on the makeup.

Anaïs Nin
Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it.

Anaïs Nin
The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium.

Anaïs Nin
Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.

Anaïs Nin
When I stand at the top of the Champs-Elysées, with its chestnut trees in flower, its undulations of shining cars, its white spaciousness, I feel as if I were biting into a utopian fruit, something velvety and lustrous and rich and vivid.

Anaïs Nin
Guilt is the one burden human beings can't bear alone.

Anaïs Nin
The times in his studio when he washed his hands and they smoked, for his hands were so warm and the water so cold.

Anaïs Nin
I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes.

Anaïs Nin
We cannot cure the evils of politics with politics...

Anaïs Nin
At sixteen, Sabina took moon baths, first of all, because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous.

Anaïs Nin
Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

Anaïs Nin
You marry the day you realize the human defects of your love.

Anaïs Nin
The best way to remember a beautiful city or a beautiful painting is to eat something while you are looking at it. The flavor really helps the image to penetrate the body. It fixes it as lacquer does a drawing.

Anaïs Nin