Quotes from Anais Nin

There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

I want to run out and kiss her fantastic beauty, kiss it and say, You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You will always be part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.

How can I accept a limited definable self when I feel, in me, all possibilities?... I never feel the four walls around the substance of the self, the core. I feel only space. Illimitable space.

My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure.

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.

I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.

I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

She makes use of the soft of the bread for a napkin. She falls asleep at times with shoes on, on unmade beds. When a little money comes in, June buys delicacies, strawberries in the winter, caviar and bath salts.

You live out the confusions until they become clear.

I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.

When you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive

words carry colors and sounds into the flesh

Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress my hairdresser, my make-up, it will work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.

I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have shared my kingdom with you.

Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives.

With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness... something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame, annihilate him, with a pleasure never known before.

he made me understand something very important. Whether because I am a Latin, or because I am a neurotic, I have a need of gestures. I am myself expressive, demonstrative; every feeling I have takes on expression: words, gestures, signs, letters, articulateness or action. I need this in others.

You are the poet, you walk inside my dreams...

He had not touched me. He did not need to. His presence had affected me in such a way that I felt as if he had caressed me for a long time.

But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted.

We see things not as they are, but as we are. Because it is the 'I' behind the 'eye' that does the seeing.

The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.