Anais Nin

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

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

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.

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.

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.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

"We see the world as 'we' are, not as 'it' is; because it is the "I" behind the 'eye' that does the seeing."

What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.

I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.

The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.

Love men and women not for their strength but their softness, not for their fullness but their hunger, not for their plenty but their need.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage "People living deeply have no fear of death.

To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one's mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.

I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate. It was not a matter of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair.

I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me.

I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt.

My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure.

I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced.

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.

Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives.

Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.