Anaïs Nin - Live Quotes

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The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment with it, that was the miracle.

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

Anaïs Nin
She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others.

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

Anaïs Nin
Living never wore one out as much as the effort not to live, she believed, and only if one lived fully and freely one also rested fully and deeply.

Anaïs Nin
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.

Anaïs Nin
It is difficult to live with the pure. They do not condemn you; they forgive you. This forgiveness is more terrible than a judgment.

Anaïs Nin
I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

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

Anaïs Nin
All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.

Anaïs Nin
When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

Anaïs Nin
Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

Anaïs Nin
Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against 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
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
Houses turn to corpses overnight when we cease to live and love in them.

Anaïs Nin
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

Anaïs Nin
Neurosis was caused by our attempt to separate physical and metaphysical levels, to set them up in opposition to each other, thus engaging in an internecine war. If it is true that we do live on several levels simultaneously- drama and action, past and present, personal and collective- we are given ways to unify them: one by religion, the other by art. Separating such levels is only necessary when they conflict, and separation is a result of conflict. Seeing how these levels can work together in harmony is the task of our contemporary writers.

Anaïs Nin