Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin

"There were always in me two women at least one woman desperate and bewildered who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene as upon a stage conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses helplessness despair and present to the world only a smile an eagerness curiosity enthusiasm interest."
145 Quotes
"There were always in me two women at least one woman desperate and bewildered who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene as upon a stage conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses helplessness despair and present to the world only a smile an eagerness curiosity enthusiasm interest."
Anaïs Nin
"Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."
Anaïs Nin
"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."
Anaïs Nin
"There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection."
Anaïs Nin
"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
Anaïs Nin
"How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me- full rich lives from birth to death, and you just have to have these rest periods in between."
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."
Anaïs Nin Henry & June
"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery."
Anaïs Nin
"“People living deeply have no fear of death.”"
Anaïs Nin
"I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again."
Anaïs Nin
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
Anaïs Nin
"She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness... A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there."
Anaïs Nin
"In chaos, there is fertility."
Anaïs Nin
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive."
Anaïs Nin
"He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it."
Anaïs Nin
"I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding."
Anaïs Nin
"Motherhood is a vocation like any other. It should be freely chosen, not imposed upon woman."
Anaïs Nin
"I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence."
Anaïs Nin
"Wherever this is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me."
Anaïs Nin
"I put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all."
Anaïs Nin
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