Quotes from Anais Nin

I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.

Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

Dreams are necessary to life.

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

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

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death

it was while helping others to be free that I gained my own freedom.

I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.

[Families] are made to make you forget yourself occasionally so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.

We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.

There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions

I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.

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

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic -- in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishing.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing.

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.