Quotes from Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin said...

• "We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are."

• "The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."
• "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
• "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
• "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."
• "I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living."
• "I am not a Sunday morning inside four walls with clean blood and organized drawers. I am the hurricane setting fire to the forests at night when no one else is alive or awake however you choose to see it and I live in my own flames sometimes burning too bright and too wild to make things last or handle myself or anyone else and so I run. Run run run far and wide until my bones ache and lungs split and it feels good. Hear that people? It feels good because I am the slave and ruler of my own body and I wish to do with it exactly as I please."
• "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."
• "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 role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

• "I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality, those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my 'idea of them.'"
• "I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind."
• "The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration."
• "I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me."
• "The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle."
• "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."

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

• "The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself."
• "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
• "I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing."
• "I want to live only for ecstasy. Small doses, moderate loves, all half-shades, leave me cold. I like extravagance, heat."
• "The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery."
• "The artist's duty is to express the spirit of the time."
• "The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself."
• "It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see"