Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. Anaïs Nin
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We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. Anaïs Nin
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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. Anaïs Nin
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We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. Anaïs Nin
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It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before… to test yout 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. Anaïs Nin
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From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life. Anaïs Nin
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I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength. Anaïs Nin
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It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar. Anaïs Nin
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Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself. Anaïs Nin
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We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself. Anaïs Nin
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When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow. Anaïs Nin
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I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing. Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin Quotes on Life
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Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat. Anaïs Nin
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Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together. Anaïs Nin
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When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others. Anaïs Nin
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I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits. Anaïs Nin
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Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live. Anaïs Nin
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Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat. Anaïs Nin
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I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. 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. Anaïs Nin
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Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. Anaïs Nin
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We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. Anaïs Nin
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The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself. Anaïs Nin Quotes
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You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you’re not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn’t a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now. Anaïs Nin
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You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken. Anaïs Nin
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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. Anaïs Nin
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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. Anaïs Nin
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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. Anaïs Nin
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Dreams are necessary to life. Anaïs Nin
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Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s. Anaïs Nin
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My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living. Anaïs Nin
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People living deeply have no fear of death. Anaïs Nin Quotes Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin Quotes on Love and Friendship
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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. Anaïs Nin
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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. Anaïs Nin
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You cannot save people. You can only love them. Anaïs Nin
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Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions. Anaïs Nin
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For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love. Anaïs Nin
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The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves. Anaïs Nin
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What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship? Anaïs Nin
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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. Anaïs Nin
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You don’t find love, it finds you. It’s got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what’s written in the stars. Anaïs Nin
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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. Anaïs Nin Quotes
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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. Anaïs Nin
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The only abnormality is the incapacity to love. Anaïs Nin
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it. Anaïs Nin
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In chaos, there is fertility. Anaïs Nin
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What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements. Anaïs Nin
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There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do. Anaïs Nin
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Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together. Anaïs Nin
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When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with. Anaïs Nin
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Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves. Anaïs Nin
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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. Anaïs Nin
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When one is pretending, the entire body revolts. Anaïs Nin
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Truth is something which can’t be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning. Anaïs Nin
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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. Anaïs Nin
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Stories do not end. Anaïs Nin
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It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all. Anaïs Nin
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The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle. Anaïs Nin
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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.’ Anaïs Nin
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The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery. Anaïs Nin
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I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you. Anaïs Nin
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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. Anaïs Nin Quotes
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Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are. Anaïs Nin
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I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. Anaïs Nin
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Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living. Anaïs Nin Quotes Anaïs Nin
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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. Anaïs Nin
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If a person continues to see giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child. Anaïs Nin
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We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art–we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones. Anaïs Nin
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Good things happen to those who hustle. Anaïs Nin
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The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. Anaïs Nin
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I know why familles were created, with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed. Anaïs Nin
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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. Anaïs Nin
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Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness. Anaïs Nin
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I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals. Anaïs Nin
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I only feel close to people who arouse my energy, who make enormous demands of me, who are capable of enriching me with experience, pain, people who do not doubt my courage, or my toughness. People who do not believe me naive or innocent, but who challenge my keenest wisdom, who have the courage to treat me like a woman in spite of the fact that they are aware of my vulnerability. Anaïs Nin
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We write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospection. Anaïs Nin
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You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You will always be a part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we shared, at some moment, the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage. Anaïs Nin
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If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation. Anaïs Nin
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How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself. Anaïs Nin
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I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me. Anaïs Nin
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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. Anaïs Nin
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Pain is something to master, not to wallow in. Anaïs Nin
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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. Anaïs Nin
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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 again. Anaïs Nin
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We do not see others as they are. We see them as we are. Anaïs Nin
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell was an American writer who wrote under the pen name Anaïs Nin. Among her most documented writings are her journals. She began them at age 11 in 1914 and wrote in them continually until the time of her death. In addition to her diaries, she published several novels, critical studies, and short stories.
She was born in Neuilly France on February 1, 1903 to Cuban parents. She lived the fist half of her life living in France, Cuba, and Spain. In 1939, with war impending in Europe, she left France for the United States where she would live for the remainder of her life.
She wrote in French, Spanish, and English. She believed that:
“French was the language of her heart, Spanish was the language of her ancestors, and English was the language of her intellect.”
In her diaries, she wrote in all three languages selected the language that she felt would best convey her thoughts.
Critics of the time felt that her novels tended towards surrealism.
It took until the 1960s for Nin to receive recognition as one of the leading female writers of the 20th century. The feminist movement of that decade propelled Nin’s a popularity as a lecturer at several universities. In 1973, she received an honorary doctorate from the Philadelphia College of Art. She was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1974, and in 1976 was awarded Woman of the Year by the Los Angeles Times.
Anaïs died on January 14, 1977 in Los Angeles, California.