Quotes by Anaïs Nin

Men from the mountains always dream of the sea, and above all things I love to travel.

No privacy left. No manners.

I loved your breaking down that door, repeated Djuna. Through Rango she had breathed some other realm she had never attained before. She had touched through his act some climate of violence she had never known before.

Out of worship and out of love he would let no one light the stove for her either, as if he would be the warmth and the fire to dry and warm her feet.

Although I was so big, and so rough in many ways, loved hunting, fighting, horseback riding, I loved the piano above everything else...The mountain mans obsession is to get a glimpse of the sea.

He failed to see that it contained at once all of Djunas wishes which had been denied, and these wishes had flown from all directions to meet at this intersection and to plead once more for understanding.

Of course, youll defend Jay, says Rango, He was a part of your former life, of your former values. I will never be able to alter that. I want you to think as I do.But Rango, you couldnt respect someone who surrendered an opinion merely to please you . It would be hypocrisy.

What can I say Rango? What can I do to prove to you that I belong to you?

He had appointed her not only guardian angel, but a member of his ideals.

There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection.

And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.

We ought to be much more fearful of what we don’t know. We should really be fearful of an unconscious that inhabits us, that guides us, that influences our life and of which we don’t know the face and don’t know the message. Actually I have much less fear since I confronted fears. What’s frightening to me is people whose unconscious leads them, destroys them, and yet they will never stop and look at it. That’s the minotaur in the labyrinth, which many people never come face to face with. There was a very remarkable percussion composer, Edgar Varese, who always mocked psychology, mocked psychoanalysis, mocked psychiatry. He was satirical about it, wouldn’t have any of it. And yet his whole life pattern was self-destructive. He was an innovator and a tremendous musician. But he blocked himself. His biography is out now, and you can see the pattern. You can see this demon that was driving him, the origin of it. He seemed to be a very fearless, strong, tremendous tempered man with great force; he even looked like a Corsican bandit. But he had no power over the forces that were pushing him. That is what frightens me.

In our twenties we have conflicts. We think everything is either-or, black or white: we are caught between them and we lose all our energy in the conflicts. My answer, later on in maturity, was to do them all. Not to exclude any, not to make a choice. I wanted to be everything. And I took everything in, and the more you take in, the more strength you find waiting to accomplish things and to expand your life, instead of the other (which is what we have been taught to do) which is to look for structure and to fear change, above all to fear change. Now I didnt fear change.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

Reality doesnt impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?

She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others eyes. She does not dare to be herself.