Quotes by Anais Nin

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

“The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.”

“There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, ...”

“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.”

“One discovers that destiny can be diverted, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. Once the deforming mirror has been smashed, there i...”

“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 ...”

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

“There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.”

“But my faith seems naive, at least today. Maybe tomorrow I can believe again.”

“People living deeply have no fear of death.”

“I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”

“A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse crie...”

“At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s ...”

“The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something ir...”

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

“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.”

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

“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”

“I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.”