Anaïs Nin (born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) was an American author born to Spanish-Cuban parents in France, where she was also raised. She spent some time in Spain and Cuba but lived most of her life in the United States where she became an established author. She published journals (which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death), novels, critical studies, essays, short stories, and erotica. A great deal of her work, including Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published posthumously. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.
Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.
Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.
For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds...
How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than set out to create it for herself.
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.
I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.
I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
Love reduces the complexity of living.
Memory is a great betrayer.
Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a worldly way.
Passion gives me moments of wholeness.
People living deeply have no fear of death.
Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.
Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.
Solitude may rust your words.
Stories do not end.
The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.
The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.
What I cannot love, I overlook.
Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.
You cannot save people, you can only love them.
Categories: Anaïs Nin, Quotes of the day
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