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Anaïs Nin quotes

33 quotations, each verified against its source and credited to the work it comes from — the wording as Anaïs Nin wrote or said it, not as the internet passes it around. Page 1 of 2.

Illustrated portrait of Anaïs Nin
Pen-and-ink illustration of a leather diary, fountain pen, key, and Paris correspondence beside a nighttime window

How these quotes were checked

How we decide whether a quote is genuine

Anaïs Nin may be the most misquoted writer of the twentieth century: the lines most often printed over her name on posters, candles and greeting cards are not hers. Every quote above was verified against her actual volumes — the Diaries, the novels, the criticism — by full-text search of the printed editions, and several famous lines the search could not find anywhere in her work are checked below.

The verification also corrected the record in the other direction: real Nin lines that circulate with the wrong book attached, like “I have no fear of depths” (from the novel The Four-Chambered Heart, not the Diary), are given above with their true sources.

Four famous Anaïs Nin quotes, fact-checked

A sentence linked to Anaïs Nin may be exact, shortened, remembered by someone else, or unsupported. Each label below explains what the available evidence actually proves.

Misattributed

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

The most famous “Nin” line was written by Elizabeth Appell, around 1979, for a California adult-education flyer she produced under the name Lacy Bennett — unattributed, then credited to Nin somewhere along the way and reproduced on decades of merchandise. Appell came forward publicly, with her former boss vouching for her, and gave a first-hand account in a 2023 interview. The line appears nowhere in Nin's published volumes.

  • — Sari Botton, On Elizabeth Appell and the “Risk” lines misattributed to Anaïs Nin (Adventures in Journalism) (2023)
  • — HathiTrust full-text search across Anaïs Nin's authored volumes (2026)
Unproven

“Love never dies a natural death.”

Widely shared with an elaborate continuation about wounds and withering, and cited to no book. Full-text search across Nin's authored volumes returns nothing for it, and no one who prints it names a page. It cannot be called hers until a source surfaces.

  • — HathiTrust full-text search across Anaïs Nin's authored volumes (2026)
Unproven

“I take pleasure in my transformations.”

The longer passage this opens — “I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me” — circulates without a citation, and full-text search across Nin's volumes finds no printed form of it.

  • — HathiTrust full-text search across Anaïs Nin's authored volumes (2026)
Unproven

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

Shared everywhere as the Diary's wisdom, never with a volume or page. The full-text search across her published volumes returns nothing, so the line stays off the verified list.

  • — HathiTrust full-text search across Anaïs Nin's authored volumes (2026)
Ordinary life does not interest me.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume One: 1931–1934
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Two: 1934–1939
You cannot save people. You can only love them.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Two: 1934–1939
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Three: 1939–1944
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Four: 1944–1947
Anxiety is love's greatest killer.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Four: 1944–1947
Something is always born of excess.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Four: 1944–1947
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Four: 1944–1947
It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Five: 1947–1955
We write to taste life twice
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Five: 1947–1955
I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart (1950)
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.
— Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (1932)
I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world.
— Anaïs Nin, Incest: From a Journal of Love — The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932–1934
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically
— Anaïs Nin, Incest: From a Journal of Love — The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932–1934
Loving in men and women not their strength but their softness, not their fullness but their hunger, not their plenitude but their needs.
— Anaïs Nin, Ladders to Fire (1946)
Women are moving from one circle to another, rising towards independence and self-creation.
— Anaïs Nin, Ladders to Fire (1946)
In the dark people dare to dream everything.
— Anaïs Nin, Ladders to Fire (1946)
Not to possess each other but to become each other.
— Anaïs Nin, Ladders to Fire (1946)
How long will woman be ashamed of her strength?
— Anaïs Nin, Ladders to Fire (1946)
The one who loved you best condemned you to a static role because he had adapted his being to the past self.
— Anaïs Nin, Ladders to Fire (1946)
I am lonely, yet not everybody will do.
— Anaïs Nin, Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914–1920
There is a poetic trend running all through the work. I never wanted to write plain prose, but I never wrote poetry.
— Anaïs Nin on her own writing, interviewed by Frank Roberts, KPFK radio, 1965
Yes, but she didn't influence me. It was reading Djuna Barnes, which meant much more to me personally.
— Anaïs Nin on Virginia Woolf, interviewed by Frank Roberts, KPFK radio, 1965
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.
— Anaïs Nin on her correspondence with Henry Miller, interviewed by Frank Roberts, KPFK radio, 1965
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.
— Anaïs Nin on the diary and Henry Miller's letters, interviewed by Frank Roberts, KPFK radio, 1965

Questions about Anaïs Nin quotes

Did Anaïs Nin write “the risk to remain tight in a bud”?

No. Elizabeth Appell wrote it around 1979 for a California adult-education flyer, and it was later misattributed to Nin on posters and greeting cards. Appell has claimed it publicly with a first-hand account, and the line appears nowhere in Nin's published work.

What did Anaïs Nin actually say about writing?

The verified line is from her essay on the New York diary years: “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” It is in the corpus above with its source.

Is “I have no fear of depths” from the Diary?

No — it is real Nin, but from her novel The Four-Chambered Heart, where the full sentence reads “I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” The internet files it under the Diary; the quote above carries the correct book.

How are these quotes verified?

Each line is checked by full-text search of the printed editions of Nin's own volumes — the Diaries, the novels, the criticism — so a quote ships only when a printed page carries it. The famous lines that fail that search are listed here as unproven or misattributed rather than silently included.

References

References

The sources below are the editions, archives, and full-text searches used to verify the quotations on this page. Every line was checked against one or more of them before it appeared here.

  1. 1HathiTrust full-text search across Anaïs Nin's authored volumes

    Website
    HathiTrust Digital Library, searched 4 August 2026, 2026
    Used for

    The edition-level searches behind both the verified corpus and the failed famous lines.

    View source

  2. 2On Elizabeth Appell and the “Risk” lines misattributed to Anaïs Nin (Adventures in Journalism)

    Periodical
    Adventures in Journalism (Substack), 2023
    Used for

    Elizabeth Appell's first-hand account of the most famous misattribution.

    View source
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Why these sources are here

Verification is the point of this collection: a quotation is listed only when its wording has been checked against the sources above, and the attribution notes record what each check found about the famous lines that failed.

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Every verified collection

Writers, books, and films — each line checked against its source.

Illustrated portrait of Anaïs Nin

About Anaïs Nin

The life behind the lines

The Anaïs Nin profile — the work, the places, the people.

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