Anaïs Nin Quotes

At sixteen, Sabina took moon baths — first of all, because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous.

I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth.

She was fully, painfully aware that very rarely did midnight strike in two hearts at once, very rarely did midnight arouse two different equal desires, and that any dislocation in this, any indifference, was an indication of disunity, of the difficulties, the impossibilities of fusion between two human beings.

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than 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.

We see things not as they are, but as we are. Because it is the 'I' behind the 'eye' that does the seeing.

There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.

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

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

I don't hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you into me. I could stuff my ears and it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.

I love your silences, they are like mine.

You are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.

We are more severe judges of our own acts... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.

Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a worldly way.

Stories do not end.

I had always believed in Andre Breton's freedom, to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels in thinks, to follow sensations and absurd correlations of events and images, to trust to the new realms they lead one into. "The cult of the marvelous." Also the cult of the unconscious leadership, the cult of mystery, the evasion of false logic. The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud. It is not madness. It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by the rational mind.