Anaïs Nin

"I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me."

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

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."

"I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced."

"How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?"

"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 naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."

"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 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."

"And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

"They had reached a perfect moment of human love. They had created a moment of perfect understanding and accord. This highest moment would now remain as point of comparison to torment them later on when all natural imperfections would disintegrate it."

"Out of worship and out of love he would let no one light the stove for her either, as if he would be the warmth and the fire to dry and warm her feet."

"You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now."

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

"Societies in decline have no use for visionaries."

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

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."

"The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say."

"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."

"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."

"I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again."