Anais Nin Love Quotes

I feel a little like the moon who took possession of you for a moment and then returned your soul to you. You should not love me. One ought not to love the moon. If you come too near me, I will hurt you. ~ Anais Nin

We cannot cure the evils of politics with politics ... ~ Anais Nin

What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements. ~ Anais Nin

We don't see things how they are, we see things the way we are. ~ Anais 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. ~ Anais Nin

All that is sacred and taboo in the world are meaningless. ~ Anais Nin

You cannot do any more for me," I said. "Since I have begun to depend on you I feel weaker than ever before. I have disappointed you by acting neurotically at the very moment when I should have shown the wisdom of your guidance. I don't want to ever come back to you. I feel that I must go and work and live and forget about all this. ~ Anais Nin

When life becomes too difficult, I turn to my work. I swim into a new region. ~ Anais Nin

If one's conscious life is too rigid, too regimented, then the surface may crack at times, and we are unprepared for the strange emotions or sensations we experience. ~ Anais Nin

His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that ... only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it. ~ Anais Nin

It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before ... to test yout limits ... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossum. ~ Anais Nin

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. ~ Anais Nin

I am very near to madness. I imagine my isolation, and I go mad inside, a delirium of doubts and fears. ~ Anais Nin

Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem. ~ Anais Nin

Every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room. ~ Anais Nin

Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite. ~ Anais Nin

[Fall, 1951]

To me Acapulco is the detoxicating cure for all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep. It has something to do with the presence of millions of anonymous faces, anonymous people, and the desperate ways of achieving distinction. Here, all this is nonsense. You exist by your smile and your presence. You exist for your joys and your relaxations. You exist in nature. You are part of the glittering sea, and part of the luscious, well-nourished plants, you are wedded to the sun, you are immersed in timelessness, only the present counts, and from the present you extract all the essences which can nourish the senses, and so the nerves are still, the mind is quiet, the nights are lullabies, the days are like gentle ovens in which infinitely wise sculptor's hands re-form the lost contours, the lost sensations of the body. The body comes to life. Quests, pursuits of concrete securities of one kind or another lose all their importance. As you swim, you are washed of all the excrescences of so-called civilization, which includes the incapacity to be happy under any circumstances. ~ Anais Nin

We sit on the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds. ~ Anais Nin

Over and over again I sail towards joy, which is never in the room with me, but always near me, across the way, like those rooms full of gayety one sees from the street, or the gayety in the street one sees from a window. Will I ever reach joy? It hides behind the turning merry-go-round of the traveling circus. As soon as I approach it, it is no longer joy. Joy is a foam, an illumination. I am poorer and hungrier for the want of it. When I am in the dance, joy is outside in the elusive garden. When I am in the garden, I hear it exploding from the house. When I am traveling, joy settles like an aurora borealis over the land I leave. When I stand on the shore I see it bloom on the flag of a departing ship. What joy? Have I not possessed it? I want the joy of simple colours, street organs, ribbons, flags, not a joy that takes my breath away and throws me into space alone where no one else can breathe with me, not the joy that comes from a lonely drunkenness. There are so many joys, but I have only known the ones that come like a miracle, touching everything with light. ~ Anais Nin

Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold. ~ Anais Nin

We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself. ~ Anais Nin

No, this was a melting together, a vanishing together into a soft, dark womb of warmth. ~ Anais Nin

The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality. ~ Anais Nin

It is in the movements of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately. ~ Anais Nin

Convalescence. Such an utter weakness that you lie like an animal hibernating, playing possum. You float. You are adrift. Every current is stronger than you. ~ Anais Nin

The night surrounded me, a photograph unglued from its frame. The lining of a coat ripped open like the two shells of an oyster. The day and the night unglued, and I falling in between not knowing on which layer I was resting, whether it was the cold grey upper leaf of dawn or the dark layer of night. ~ Anais Nin

For I am the kind of dangerous dreamer who executes all his reveries, wishes, words, promises, plans. The wildest and the lightest. A wish for me is not a game: it's a creation. ~ Anais Nin

Then the anger about blaming society for the situation in which we find ourselves - blaming, say, man for the situation in which woman finds herself. I don't believe in that because I believe very much our double responsibility, that we engage ourselves in destructive relationships, that we have a part of the responsibility, unconsciously. ~ Anais Nin

He asked if she sold luminous flowers that he had heard about, flowers which shone in the dark. He wanted them, he said, for a woman who shone in the dark. He could swear that when he took her to the theater and she sat back in the dark in her evening dress, her skin was as luminous as the finest sea shell, with a pale pink glow to it. And he wanted these flowers for her to wear in her hair. Mathilde did not have them. But as soon as the man left she went to look at herself in the mirror. This was the kind of feeling she wanted to inspire. Could she? ~ Anais Nin

There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous. ~ Anais Nin

Question: I am interested in so many things, and I have a terrible fear because my mother keeps telling me that I'm just going to be exploring the rest of my life and never get anything done. But I find it really hard to set my ways and say, "Well, do I want to do this, or should I try to exploit that, or should I escape and completely do one thing?"

Anaïs Nin: One word I would banish from the dictionary is 'escape.' Just banish that and you'll be fine. Because that word has been misused regarding anybody who wanted to move away from a certain spot and wanted to grow. He was an escapist. You know if you forget that word you will have a much easier time. Also you're in the prime, the beginning of your life; you should experiment with everything, try everything.... We are taught all these dichotomies, and I only learned later that they could work in harmony. We have created false dichotomies; we create false ambivalences, and very painful one's sometimes -the feeling that we have to choose. But I think at one point we finally realize, sometimes subconsciously, whether or not we are really fitted for what we try and if it's what we want to do.

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter ~ Anais Nin

These rituals Rango could not sustain, for he could not maintain the effort to arrive on time since his lifelong habit had created the opposite habit: to elude, to avoid, to disappoint every expectation of others, every commitment, every promise, every crystallization. ~ Anais Nin

Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons. ~ Anais Nin

That's sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something ... real." Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. "Real love, real friends, real body parts ... ~ Jess C. Scott

I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself. ~ Anais Nin

He gave one the feeling that the whole world was now shut out and only this sensual feast existed, that there would be no tomorrows, no meetings with anyone else – that there was only this room, this afternoon, this bed. ~ Anais Nin