Anaïs Nin quotes - page 2

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:

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.

Anaïs Nin

No one but a woman in love ever sees the maximum of men's greatness.

Anaïs Nin

Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.

Anaïs Nin

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

Anaïs Nin

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

Anaïs Nin

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

Anaïs Nin

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.

Anaïs Nin

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.

Anaïs Nin

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

Anaïs Nin

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

Anaïs Nin

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

Anaïs Nin

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

Anaïs Nin

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

Anaïs Nin

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Anaïs Nin

To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.

Anaïs Nin

We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.

Anaïs 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.

Anaïs 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.

Anaïs Nin

Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.

Anaïs Nin

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.

Anaïs Nin

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

Anaïs Nin

The dream has to be translated into reality.

Anaïs Nin