Quotes from Anais Nin

The mold we give to our lives is so that there will be no cataclysms. The order we seek we are willing to surrender to the flow of life at any time, but it is there as a brake on a car, and our health is a brake. We put brakes on, against our temperament. he said, "Even a room, arranged in a certain manner, prevents certain things from taking place in it.

Was it not an act of love to impersonate the loved one?

I will be the one woman you will never have . . . excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.

I thought of my difficulties with writing, my struggles to articulate feelings not easily expressed. Of my struggles to find a language for intuition, feelings, instincts which are, in themselves, elusive, subtle, and wordless.

What can I do to express fully what I really am?

What can I say Rango? What can I do to prove to you that I belong to you?

Dr Allendy said that it was necessary to become equal to life, that the romantic was defeated by life, really died of it, whether by tuberculosis in the old days, or by neurosis today. I had never thought before of the connection between neurosis and romanticism. Wanting the impossible? Dying when unable to reach it? Not wanting to compromise?

I have an abnormal capacity for passion.

The secret of my lies must be that which makes for good acting. I never plunge into a lie carelessly, without first telling myself: "How would I feel if this were true?

It was as if in captivity, her brilliant plumage were losing its brilliance. She felt the metamorphosis. She knew she was moulting.

Compassion is the only key I ever found which fits everyone.

sons perdidos à procura de perdidas cores. corto o ar e nado através de quartos sem paredes

Cuando uno se hace pasar por las revueltas de cuerpo entero.

Touched bottom again. Decided to liberate myself... We are never trapped unless we choose to be.

The white man had invented glasses which made objects too near or too far, cameras, telescopes, spyglasses, objects which put glass between living and vision. It was the image he sought to possess, not the texture, the living warmth, the human closeness.

Why did I feel warmed by imperfections, discomfort, and patina? Because intense living leaves scars, and I could not find such scars anywhere in America. Inner scars, softened, human wear and tear.

Wherever this is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me.

We are cruel when someone refuses to play the role in which we have cast him. We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us.

I don't look back with any pleasure at the sacrifices I made. I consider it time wasted. Whereas I do not think it time wasted to be idle, to dream, to play. Very much the contrary, I think.

He has made me lucid and sane, and I am suffering cruelly from the loss of my imaginary life.

The enormous difference between the relationships you need, and the one you deeply want. The need is created out of an accumulation of negativities, planted by traumatic experiences: fear, doubts, anxiety, dependence, weakness in certain realms, inadequacy, incompleteness. A certain relationship can remove the fear, calm anxiety, supply a certain completion, replace a loss, fulfill an organic insufficiency, lull an insecurity, supply a substitute love.

For our anxiety is the one thing we cannot place on the shoulders of others, it suffocates them.

All adventurers came to grief. Perhaps they had not been able to make the transition, to alchemize the life of the mind into the life of the senses. They died when their minds were overpowered by nature, yet they did not hesitate to dilute it in alcohol.

Men have their periods too, but the blood doesn't stop flowing automatically. There is a wild raging river flowing inside of me. I can't dam it. I'm hurt so badly. Believe me—oh shit!Believe, believe— what's there to believe any more?