Anaïs Nin
175 quotes
Biography
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin was the daughter of the composer Joaquín Nin and the classically trained singer Rosa Culmell.
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
"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."
"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
"How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?"
"I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ"
"I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them."
"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."
"Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are."
"I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living."
"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."
"The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say."
"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."
"We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls."
"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together."
"There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work."
"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery."
"We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them."
"What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again."
"Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving."
"Dreams are necessary to life."
"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."
"Societies in decline have no use for visionaries."
"What I cannot love, I overlook."
"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."