Favorite Anais Nin Quotes

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 

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman. ~ 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 

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage ~ Anais Nin

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

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. ~ Anais Nin

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself. ~ Anais Nin

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow. ~ Anais Nin

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. ~ Anais Nin

Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. ~ Anais Nin

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. ~ Anais Nin

 

“I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.” ~Anais Nin