Anais Nin Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.

Dreams are necessary to life.

You cannot save people. You can only love 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.

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.

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

Don’t let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.

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

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.