Anais Nin Quotes

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

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

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.

It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before… to test your 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.

It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.

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.

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.

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

We write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospection.

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.

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

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

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.

Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy.

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

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

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.