Anais 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.”

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

“Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.”

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

“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...”

“A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.”

“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.”

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

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”

“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.”

“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, w...”

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

“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.”

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

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

“Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.”

“Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”

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

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

“The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”