Anaïs Nin Quotes

222 Sourced Quotes

Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.

Anaïs Nin
I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt.

Anaïs Nin
I loved an image of him which did not exist. When he is away, this image begins to obsess me. It invades me, and I begin to believe in it again. It is destroyed each time I see him.

Anaïs Nin
One always, sooner or later, comes upon a city which is an image of one's inner cities. Fez is an image of my inner self.... The layers of the city of Fez are like the layers and secrecies of the inner life. One needs a guide.... There were in Fez, as in my life, streets which led nowhere, impasses which remained a mystery.

Anaïs Nin
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

Anaïs Nin
Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy.

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

Anaïs Nin
Self-destructive patterns cause as much suffering as outer catastrophes.

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

Anaïs Nin
Asia discovered two remedies for the cruelty of man, art and religion. America discarded both and is drowning in hate and aggressivity.

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
Poetry, which is our relation to the senses, enables us to retain a living relationship to all things. It is the quickest means of transportation to reach dimensions above or beyond the traps set by the so-called realists. It is a way to learn levitation and travel in liberated continents, to travel by moonlight as well as sunlight.

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
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
When I cannot bear outer pressures any more, I begin to put order in my belongings. I get satisfaction from perfect order in my papers, in my clothes, in the house. I carry this to excess. As if unable to organize and control my life, I seek to exert this on the world of objects.

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

Anaïs Nin
To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school [of writing]. A hunger for the unknown and an aspiration toward beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial.

Anaïs Nin
She acquired the certainty of the expansion of time by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity of experience.

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

Anaïs Nin
The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted.

Anaïs Nin
To the woman with the least intelligence, there must come, at some time or other, the realization that housework is animal work and that there are other occupations in the world a thousand times more refined, more enriching, for which she is also suited and to which she has a right.

Anaïs Nin
I would say that compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

Anaïs Nin
Stations and airports are rehearsals for separations by death.

Anaïs Nin
The ghost of her potential father tormented her like a hunger for something which she knew had been invented or created solely by herself, but which she feared might never take human shape.

Anaïs Nin
I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.

Anaïs Nin
There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time.

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
The sap rising in the trees does not rise each year with greater strength, but life rises in me each year with greater strength, and can I endure it? The symphonic concerts of the birds do not get louder, but my cries of exultation, yes, and can others endure it?

Anaïs Nin
Our love of each other is like one long shadow kissing without hope of reality.

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