Anaïs Nin quotes - page 7

I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman. (Anaïs Nin)
The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything. View quote
Anaïs Nin
In my childhood diary I wrote: "I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much. View quote
Anaïs Nin
The two men who have done the greatest harm to the world are Christ and Columbus. Christ taught us guilt and sacrifice, to live only in the other world, and Columbus discovered America and materialism. View quote
Anaïs Nin
Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws. View quote
Anaïs Nin
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. View quote
Anaïs Nin
Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her. View quote
Anaïs Nin
I sleep with my feet on moss carpets, my branches in the cotton of the clouds. View quote
Anaïs Nin
It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it. View quote
Anaïs Nin
We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself. View quote
Anaïs Nin
Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again. (Anaïs Nin)
Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their mysteries and secrets, they act and pretend. I like the character of men better. View quote
Anaïs Nin
The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable, which is the lost faith. View quote
Anaïs Nin
I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ. View quote
Anaïs Nin
The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy. View quote
Anaïs Nin
The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility. View quote
Anaïs Nin
For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue - that I had to do the job myself. View quote
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 want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again. View quote
Anaïs Nin
I wanted to remember in order to be able to return. View quote
Anaïs Nin
Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction. View quote
Anaïs Nin
I can't let you go now. I want to go places with you; obscure little places, just to be able to say: here I came with her. (Anaïs Nin)
If a person continues to see giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child. View quote
Anaïs Nin
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness. View quote
Anaïs Nin
At sixteen, Sabina took moon baths, first of all, because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous. View quote
Anaïs Nin
Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer. View quote
Anaïs Nin