Anaïs Nin Quotes

222 Sourced Quotes

A city never entirely known, yet which gives you the feeling of intimacy, of possessing it intimately.

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
The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.

Anaïs Nin
We must protect the minority writers because they are the research workers of literature. They keep it alive. It has been fashionable of late to seek out and force such writers into more popular channels, to the detriment of both writer and an unprepared public.

Anaïs Nin
If you are terribly truthful, the ground will always move from under you, and you will have to shift with the constantly shifting truth.

Anaïs Nin
Is devotion to others a cover for the hungers and the needs of the self, of which one is ashamed? I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.

Anaïs Nin
No one should be forced to carry the unfulfilled self of another.

Anaïs Nin
Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

Anaïs Nin
Through love, through friendship, a heart lives more than one life.

Anaïs Nin
The inner chambers of the soul are like the photographer's darkroom. Like a laboratory. One cannot stay there all the time or it becomes the solitary cell of the neurotic.

Anaïs Nin
I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from man's and for which man's language was inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored. D. H. Lawrence began to give instinct a language, he tried to escape the clinical, the scientific, which only captures what the body feels.

Anaïs Nin
I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.

Anaïs Nin