Quotes by Anais Nin

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

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

We dont see things as they are, we see them as we are.

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 naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

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

Truth is something which cant be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

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

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

“What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.”

“One discovers that destiny can be diverted, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. Once the deforming mirror has been smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness. There is a possibility of joy.”

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we dont 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.”