Question: I am interested in so many things, and I have a terrible fear because my mother keeps telling me that I'm just going to be exploring the rest of my life and never get anything done. But I find it really hard to set my ways and say, "Well, do I want to do this, or should I try to exploit that, or should I escape and completely do one thing?" Anaïs Nin: One word I would banish from the dictionary is 'escape.' Just banish that and you'll be fine. Because that word has been misused regarding anybody who wanted to move away from a certain spot and wanted to grow. He was an escapist. You know if you forget that word you will have a much easier time. Also you're in the prime, the beginning of your life; you should experiment with everything, try everything.... We are taught all these dichotomies, and I only learned later that they could work in harmony. We have created false dichotomies; we create false ambivalences, and very painful one's sometimes -the feeling that we have to choose. But I think at one point we finally realize, sometimes subconsciously, whether or not we are really fitted for what we try and if it's what we want to do. 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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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