Anaïs Nin on Life

"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, a new country."

"You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this."

"All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished."

"To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you."

"The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive."

"It was a misunderstanding to stress the dream like quality of the novels. What I meant to stress was the interrelation between dream and life, between dream and action."

"Only in the fever of creation could she recreate her own lost life."

"Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous."

"Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment."

"Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and to art."

"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."

"Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live."

"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."

"Most fiction writers uses dreams decoratively without relating them to daily life, but the contemporary writer is becoming more expert at detecting the influence of one upon the other."

"Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life."

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

"I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama."

"My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living."

"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."

"Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are."

"Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage."

"This abdiction of life demanded of the artist is to be achieved only relatively. Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents."

"People living deeply have no fear of death."

"The necessity for fiction was probably born of the problem of taboo on certain revelations. It was not only a need of the imagination but an answer to the limitations placed on portrayal of others."

"Love reduces the complexity of living."

"The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them."

"I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself."

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."