We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.
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.
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.
We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art–we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
One discovers that destiny can be diverted, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made on childhood sensibilities. Once the deforming mirror has been smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness. There is a possibility of joy.
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle.
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.
I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.
I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits
I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.
When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness.
Anaïs Nin
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.
Anaïs Nin
All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
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.
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.
I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.
Anaïs Nin
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.
Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.