Quotes from Anais Nin

America hates the artist. It will not admit: the artist is my soul and I want to kill off my soul.

There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.

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 psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

Violence is a symptom of impotence.

I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me.

When one is pretending the entire body revolts.

Beware of allowing a tactless word, rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.

One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap is the most difficult to make-to part with one's faith, one's love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

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.

...one's neuroses have possibilities of beauty.

A war regarded as inevitable or even probable and therefore much prepared for has a very good chance of eventually being fought.

The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.

I was thinking of my patients and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate they were in despair.

We have been poisoned by fairy tales.

He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.

We see the world not as it is, but as we are.

I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness.

The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man's cult of beauty.

The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.

The love of only one man or one woman is an enclosure.

Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their mysteries and secrets, they act and pretend. I like the character of men better.

Love men and women not for their strength but their softness, not for their fullness but their hunger, not for their plenty but their need.