Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
- Anais Nin
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by living, by losing.
- Anais Nin
Dreams are necessary to life.
- Anais Nin
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
- Anais Nin
Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, or a new country.
- 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.
- Anais Nin
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
- Anais Nin
We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.
- Anais 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.
- Anais Nin
The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
- Anais Nin
The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.
- Anais Nin
Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment.
- Anais Nin
The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
- Anais Nin
Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
- Anais Nin
Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.
- Anais Nin
Anxiety is love's greatest killer.
- Anais Nin
My first vision of earth was water veiled.
- Anais Nin
Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.
- Anais Nin
Only in the fever of creation could she recreate her own lost life.
- Anais Nin
In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude.
- Anais Nin
This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men’s dreams.
- Anais Nin
Every word you wrote I ate, as if it were manna.
- Anais Nin
Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve,
- Anais Nin
You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.
- Anais Nin
The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.
- Anais Nin
Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.
- Anais Nin
The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.
- Anais Nin
For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds...
- Anais Nin
My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.
- Anais Nin
Passion gives me moments of wholeness.
- Anais Nin
We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.
- Anais Nin
Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.
- Anais Nin
Love reduces the complexity of living.
- Anais Nin
To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.
- Anais Nin
I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes.
- Anais Nin
There will never be darkness because in both of us there's always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection has been a still experience...
- Anais Nin
When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.
- Anais Nin
People living deeply have no fear of death.
- Anais Nin
You cannot save people, you can only love them.
- Anais Nin
I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day.
- Anais Nin
Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance - that is all!
- Anais Nin
In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.
- Anais Nin
Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.
- Anais Nin
No desire of the body, but for what lies in there, what lies in the flesh, the world, the thought, the creation, the illumination.
- Anais Nin
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
- Anais Nin
The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything.
- Anais Nin
