Anaïs Nin : Quotes

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
"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 withering, of tarnishing."
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
"If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation."
"For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration."
"It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before, to test your limits, to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
"How wrong is it for a woman to expect man to build the world she wants, rather than set out to create it herself."
"Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness."
"Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself."
"Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry."
"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."
"The only abnormality is the inability to love."
"I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing."
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world not possibly born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
"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 cannot 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."
"We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds."
"The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy."
"Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."
"Dreams are necessary to life."
"Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it."
"The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment with it, that was the miracle."
"Love is the axis and breath of my life."