Quotes by Anaïs Nin

“I put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all.”

“Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.”

“For our anxiety is the one thing we cannot place on the shoulders of others, it suffocates them.”

“I never lose sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled.”

“Wherever there is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me.”

“Wherever this is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me.”

“The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over...”

“I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept bec...”

“You sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in spite of it, out of anything, any material given...”

“You haven't loved yet," he said. "You've only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, illusion is not love, desire alone is not love. All these were paths leading you out o...”

“You are a real hermaphrodite, Mafouka,’ I said. 'That is what our age is supposed to have produced because the tension between the masculine and the feminine has broken down, people are mostly half...”

“Motherhood is a vocation like any other. It should be freely chosen, not imposed upon woman.”

“I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his lif...”

“Fucking is an art. The mere fact of introducing the cock in the cunt and moving it in and out until the ejaculation of spunk is not art. True, it is fucking, but the difference between that way of ...”

“Even when they did not look at each other or speak to each other, he could feel a powerful current between them.”

“He never treated her as a wife. He wooed her over and over again, with presents, flowers, new pleasures.”

“I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rath...”

“Every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room.”

“When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshies...”

“We are dancing on our irony as upon the top of glowing sparks.”