Anais Nin

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

Dreams are necessary to life.

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.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

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

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

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

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

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

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

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

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

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

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

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.

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 all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.

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.

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

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

The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.