Anais Nin
44 quotes
Biography
"Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country."
"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."
"Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions."
"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."
"What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?"
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
"Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living."
"The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle."
"There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life."
"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."
"I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern."
"Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together."
"Good things happen to those who hustle."
"There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do."
"I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy."
"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."
"A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked."
"When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow."
"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."
"I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern."
"Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning."
"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."
"When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others."
"I will not be just a tourist in the world of images just watching images passing by which I cannot live in make love to possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy."
"One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life and that leap is the most difficult to make-to part with one's faith one's love when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion."