Anaïs Nin

“The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.”

“We are more severe judges of our own acts... We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.”

“He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.”

“There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned.”

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

“A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoar...”

“At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering H...”

“People living deeply have no fear of death.”

“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”

“I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.”

“A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.”

“The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages i...”

“Henry's recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love whil...”

“I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood.”

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

“Love the great narcotic was the revealer in the alchemist's bottle rendering visible the most untraceable substances. Love the great narcotic was the agent provocateur exposing all the secre...”

“When you're in my arms, I know you're mine. But your feet are so swift, so swift, they carry you as lightly as wings, I never know where, too fast, too fast away from me.”

“When you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive”

“You are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.”

“Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions...”