Quotes from Anais Nin

Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people's.

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.

Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.

I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.

To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.

I'm awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.

I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.

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.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.

In my childhood diary I wrote: "I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much.

When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness.

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

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

When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.

To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break myself. I want to live only for ecstasy. I'm neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous - lava, inflammable, unrestrained.

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.

Passion gives me moments of wholeness

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can't be loved as I am.

I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from a man's and for which man's language was so inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored.