Quotes from Anais Nin

How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?

...then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer.

...whereas 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 naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

When one is pretending the entire body revolts. There come great eruptions and revolts, great dark ravages, and above all, a joylessness. A great, bleak joylessness. Everything that is natural brings joy.

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.

The core of creation is to summon an image and the power to work with the image.

Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.

There is an ugliness in being paid for work one does not like.

Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.

I don't wish power, only art -art and passion.

I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.

When you possess light within, you see it externally.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we ... believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful then the risk it took to blossom.

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Death from disillusion is not instantaneous, and there are no mercy killers for the disillusioned.

When I am most deeply rooted, I feel the wildest desire to uproot myself.

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

It is in the movements of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately.

I write emotional algebra.

The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.

Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.

[Y]ou have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.