Quotes from Anais Nin

Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death

Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge.

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.

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

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.

Wherever this is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me.

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

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

We are cruel when someone refuses to play the role in which we have cast him. We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us.

life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat.

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

Living never wore one so much as the effort not to live.

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

In every relationship, sooner or later, there is a court scene. Accusations, counter-accusations, a trial, a verdict.

Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an artist.

Asia discovered two remedies for the cruelty of man, art and religion. America discarded both and is drowning in hate and aggressivity.

I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all. . .

jazz is the expression of America's romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source.

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