Anais Nin
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.Collection: Art
Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.Collection: Truth
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.Collection: Brainy
Dreams are necessary to life.Collection: Dreams
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.Collection: Dreams
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.Collection: Death
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.Collection: Dreams
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.Collection: Courage
What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?Collection: Friendship
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.Collection: Age
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.Collection: Knowledge
How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.Collection: Women
I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.Collection: Dad
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.Collection: Morning
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, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.Collection: Truth
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.Collection: Death
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.Collection: Life
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.Collection: Fear
Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Art
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.Collection: Dreams
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.Collection: Friendship
There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.Collection: Imagination
People living deeply have no fear of death.Collection: Death
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.Collection: Love
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.Collection: Religion
Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.Collection: Strength
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.Collection: Courage
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.Collection: Travel
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.Collection: Death
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.
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.
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.
We write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospection.
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.
It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.Collection: Break Through
Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.Collection: Strength
My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.Collection: Pride
Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.Collection: Lying
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through.Collection: Passion
The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love. The only magic against death, aging, ordinary life, is love.Collection: Alchemist
You fall in love with people's minds.Collection: Falling In Love