Anaïs Nin quotes

Ordinary life does not interest me.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.

You cannot save people. You can only love them.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly.

Anxiety is love's greatest killer.

Something is always born of excess.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.

It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.

We write to taste life twice

I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

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.

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world.

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically

Loving in men and women not their strength but their softness, not their fullness but their hunger, not their plenitude but their needs.

Women are moving from one circle to another, rising towards independence and self-creation.

In the dark people dare to dream everything.

Not to possess each other but to become each other.

How long will woman be ashamed of her strength?

The one who loved you best condemned you to a static role because he had adapted his being to the past self.

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do.

There is a poetic trend running all through the work. I never wanted to write plain prose, but I never wrote poetry.

Yes, but she didn't influence me. It was reading Djuna Barnes, which meant much more to me personally.

I played a feminine role. I was shy. I listened, and my letters were merely at that time to encourage his writing, but I couldn't keep up with him, and I couldn't very well answer this avalanche.

But my real answer, because of the shyness, was in the diary. And so the diary runs parallel, and is a completion and a pendant and an answer to the letters.