Quotes from Anais Nin

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

I write emotional algebra.

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.

Dreams are necessary to life.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

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

What I cannot love, I overlook.

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.

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

I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self.

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.

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.

In chaos, there is fertility.

I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

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

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.

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

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

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

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.

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

I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.