Anaïs Nin quote: "I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving."

I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do sto...
ANAïS NIN

We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.
ANAïS NIN

In chaos, there is fertility.
ANAïS NIN

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of p...
ANAïS NIN

Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
ANAïS NIN

Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strengt...
ANAïS NIN

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much s...
ANAïS NIN

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by...
ANAïS NIN

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more myst...
ANAïS NIN

Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shack...
ANAïS NIN

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a...
ANAïS NIN

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
ANAïS NIN

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
ANAïS NIN

Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though wh...
ANAïS NIN

What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge tha...
ANAïS NIN

Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave th...
ANAïS NIN

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
ANAïS NIN

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
ANAïS NIN

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies ...
ANAïS NIN

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; ...
ANAïS NIN

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to bl...
ANAïS NIN

I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.
ANAïS NIN

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, w...
ANAïS NIN

The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is dest...
ANAïS NIN

How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it...
ANAïS NIN

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.
ANAïS NIN

Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up...
ANAïS NIN

She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of hersel...
ANAïS NIN

I don't hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress, anothe...
ANAïS NIN

This great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes a...
ANAïS NIN

His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that...only angels and devils can catch the tempo o...
ANAïS NIN

And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling...
ANAïS NIN

I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness...
ANAïS NIN

I'm sick of my own romanticism!
ANAïS NIN

I want to make my own discoveries…….penetrate the evil which attracts me
ANAïS NIN

What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I...
ANAïS NIN

I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman...
ANAïS NIN

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.
ANAïS NIN

There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierar...
ANAïS NIN

If I fall asleep, it is because I am overloaded. I sleep because one hour with Henry contains five y...
ANAïS NIN

But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest u...
ANAïS NIN

The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will ...
ANAïS NIN

He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, ...
ANAïS NIN

I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the...
ANAïS NIN

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punis...
ANAïS NIN

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I...
ANAïS NIN

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept becau...
ANAïS NIN

I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me.
ANAïS NIN

There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.
ANAïS NIN

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a ...
ANAïS NIN

Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.
ANAïS NIN

I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from ...
ANAïS NIN

I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my fe...
ANAïS NIN

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an ...
ANAïS NIN

When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, ...
ANAïS NIN

I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.
ANAïS NIN

No man and woman know what will be born in the darkness of their intermingling; so much besides chil...
ANAïS NIN

The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whol...
ANAïS NIN

His entire body was pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could s...
ANAïS NIN

And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the...
ANAïS NIN

The magic beauty of simultaneity, to see the loved one rushing toward you at the same moment you are...
ANAïS NIN

Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins...
ANAïS NIN

So many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost object, a misplaced unread book, clutterin...
ANAïS NIN

In this instant of danger they realized they were each other's reason for living, and into this inst...
ANAïS NIN

When you're in my arms, I know you're mine. But your feet are so swift, so swift, they carry you as ...
ANAïS NIN

You are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.
ANAïS NIN

Love the great narcotic was the revealer in the alchemist's bottle rendering visible the most untrac...
ANAïS NIN

When you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive
ANAïS NIN

I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on...
ANAïS NIN

At first she beckoned and lured one into her world; then, she blurred the passageways, confused all ...
ANAïS NIN

Paul, Paul, this is the claim you never made, the fervor you never showed. You were so cool and ligh...
ANAïS NIN

The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at t...
ANAïS NIN

Ali Baba protects the lovers! Gives them the luck of bandits, and no guilt, for love fills certain p...
ANAïS NIN

They had reached a perfect moment of human love. They had created a moment of perfect understanding ...
ANAïS NIN

Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love. When something hurts you, sad...
ANAïS NIN

I have raged at the wall growing between myself and others. I expect intuitive, miraculous understan...
ANAïS NIN

I looked at it [revolver] as if it reminded me of a crime I had committed with an irrepressible smil...
ANAïS NIN

At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing ...
ANAïS NIN

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happines...
ANAïS NIN

You cannot save people. You can only love them.
ANAïS NIN

The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like anothe...
ANAïS NIN

..he made me understand something very important. Whether because I am a Latin, or because I am a ne...
ANAïS NIN

June, you have killed my sincerity too. I will never again know who I am, what I am, what I love, wh...
ANAïS NIN

Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the lo...
ANAïS NIN

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the fe...
ANAïS NIN

I only feel close to people who arouse my energy, who make enormous demands of me, who are capable o...
ANAïS NIN

She makes use of the soft of the bread for a napkin. She falls asleep at times with shoes on, on unm...
ANAïS NIN

The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a ...
ANAïS NIN

I palliate the sufferings of others. yes I see myself as softening the blows, dissolving acids, neut...
ANAïS NIN

The two men who have done the greatest harm to the world are Christ and Columbus. Christ taught us g...
ANAïS NIN

The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life ...
ANAïS NIN

Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of f...
ANAïS NIN

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealist...
ANAïS NIN

I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.
ANAïS NIN

Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which ...
ANAïS NIN

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

If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses
ANAïS NIN

I would like to have your sureness. I am waiting for love, the core of a woman's life."
Don't w...
ANAïS NIN

I have no brakes on...analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life.
ANAïS NIN

In my childhood diary I wrote: “I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when ...
ANAïS NIN

To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.
ANAïS NIN

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealist...
ANAïS NIN

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ...
ANAïS NIN

The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.
ANAïS NIN

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

I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot m...
ANAïS NIN

The drug of love was no escape, for in its coils lie latent dreams of greatness which awaken when me...
ANAïS NIN

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire,...
ANAïS NIN

Woman’s role in creation should be parallel to her role in life. I don’t mean the good earth. I ...
ANAïS NIN

You don't find love, it finds you. It's got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what's writte...
ANAïS NIN

With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile wav...
ANAïS NIN

Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go.
ANAïS NIN

Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky
ANAïS NIN

Question: I am interested in so many things, and I have a terrible fear because my mother keeps tell...
ANAïS NIN

Like the Baron, Mathilde developed a formula for acting out life as a series of roles—that is, by ...
ANAïS NIN

They courted the face on the screen, the face of translucence, the face of wax on which men found it...
ANAïS NIN

Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.
ANAïS NIN

The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by ste...
ANAïS NIN

And in his eyes he had the look of the cat who inspires a desire to caress but loves no one, who nev...
ANAïS NIN

I feel a little like the moon who took possession of you for a moment and then returned your soul to...
ANAïS NIN

You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclu...
ANAïS NIN

Coming near him like a ballet dancer she took a leap towards him, and he, frightened by her vehemenc...
ANAïS NIN

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

Good things happen to those who hustle.
ANAïS NIN

To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break myself. I want to li...
ANAïS NIN

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connec...
ANAïS NIN

I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish dis...
ANAïS NIN

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others empha...
ANAïS NIN

I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lo...
ANAïS NIN

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to...
ANAïS NIN

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women ther...
ANAïS NIN

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhi...
ANAïS NIN

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.
ANAïS NIN

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
ANAïS NIN

There is no bleaker moment in life of the city than that one which crosses the boundary lines betwee...
ANAïS NIN

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept becau...
ANAïS NIN

There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was dr...
ANAïS NIN

I am not always just living, just following all my fantasies; I come up for air, for understanding.
ANAïS NIN

What I cannot love, I overlook.
ANAïS NIN

He never treated her as a wife. He wooed her over and over again, with presents, flowers, new pleasu...
ANAïS NIN

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
ANAïS NIN

Dreams are necessary to life.
ANAïS NIN

To commit suicide is easy. To live without a god is more difficult. The drunkenness of triumph is gr...
ANAïS NIN

I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effe...
ANAïS NIN

Again I take a taxi to Clichy address, but feel that I do not want to go on loving Henry more active...
ANAïS NIN

At five o'clock Paris always has a current of eroticism in the air.
ANAïS NIN

How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, inclu...
ANAïS NIN

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.
ANAïS NIN

And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to b...
ANAïS NIN

I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark though the witches are all hung, ...
ANAïS NIN

I walked into my own book, seeking peace.
It was night, and I made a careless movement inside t...
ANAïS NIN

There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.
ANAïS NIN

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
ANAïS NIN

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then do...
ANAïS NIN

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
ANAïS NIN

The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.
ANAïS NIN

My attraction to drugs is based on an immense desire to annihilate awareness.
ANAïS NIN

She is suspicious of words. She lives by her senses, by her intuition. We don’t have a language fo...
ANAïS NIN

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
ANAïS NIN

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
ANAïS NIN

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.
ANAïS NIN

I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the botto...
ANAïS NIN

When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.
ANAïS NIN

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. Ther...
ANAïS NIN

People living deeply have no fear of death.
ANAïS NIN

From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to...
ANAïS NIN

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is t...
ANAïS NIN

The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
ANAïS NIN

She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in t...
ANAïS NIN

For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to ...
ANAïS NIN

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

When I first met him, he did not care if a friend did not fit into his world, because at that time h...
ANAïS NIN

You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence...
ANAïS NIN

Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their m...
ANAïS NIN

A man fell in love with Jeanne, and she tried to love him. But she complained that he uttered such o...
ANAïS NIN

I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a foo...
ANAïS NIN

You cannot do any more for me," I said. "Since I have begun to depend on you I feel weaker than ever...
ANAïS NIN

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of p...
ANAïS NIN

We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are
ANAïS NIN

Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are...
ANAïS NIN

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emp...
ANAïS NIN

I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them.
ANAïS NIN

Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.
ANAïS NIN

[Y]ou have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The ful...
ANAïS NIN

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.
ANAïS NIN

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
ANAïS NIN

I write emotional algebra.
ANAïS NIN

She was truthful, or I was the greatest dupe who ever existed. I can only believe in our ecstasy. I ...
ANAïS NIN

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
ANAIS NIN

The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that ...
ANAIS NIN

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it...
ANAIS NIN

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds o...
ANAIS NIN

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
ANAIS NIN

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
ANAIS NIN

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
ANAIS NIN

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?
ANAIS NIN

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
ANAIS NIN

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
ANAIS NIN

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
ANAIS NIN

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It d...
ANAIS NIN

I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.

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Anaïs Nin

I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.

Anaïs Nin

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