Anaïs Nin - Living Quotes

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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
To withhold from living is to die... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.

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

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
In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.

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
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
Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.

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
Our American culture made a virtue of our living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center, and so we lost our center and had to find it again.

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

Anaïs Nin