Anaïs Nin quotes - page 12

Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban-American diarist, essayist, and author, renowned for her deeply personal and introspective writing. Her diaries offer unique insight into the artistic and literary circles of the 20th century. She became an influential figure in feminist literature and modern autobiographical writing. Here are 284 of her quotes:

I need a place where I can shout and weep. I have to be a Spanish savage at some time of the day. I record here the hysteria life causes in me. The overflow of an undisciplined extravagance. To hell with taste and art, with all contractions and polishings. Here I shout, I dance, I weep, I gnash my teeth, I go mad - all by myself, in bad English, in chaos. It will keep me sane for the world and for art .

Anaïs Nin

Someday I'll be locked up for love insanity. "She loved too much."

Anaïs Nin

Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me - the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.

Anaïs Nin

At a lecture I am asked to pronounce my name three times. I try to be slow and emphatic, "Anaïs - Anaïs - Anaïs. You just say "Anna" and then add "ees," with the accent on the "ees."

Anaïs Nin

To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one's mind and the psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.

Anaïs Nin

Too late for changes, too late perhaps for explanations and ideological webs, but the love goes on, the love goes on, blind to laws and warnings and even to wisdom and to fears. And whatever that love is, perhaps an illusion of a new love, I want it, I can't resist it, my whole being melts in one kiss, my knowledge melts, my fears melt, my blood dances, my legs open.

Anaïs Nin

I had always believed in Andre Breton's freedom, to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels in thinks, to follow sensations and absurd correlations of events and images, to trust to the new realms they lead one into. "The cult of the marvelous." Also the cult of the unconscious leadership, the cult of mystery, the evasion of false logic. The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud. It is not madness. It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by the rational mind.

Anaïs Nin

Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.

Anaïs Nin