Anaïs Nin on Love

"Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence."

"When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness."

"Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving."

"I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often."

"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."

"I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe."

"Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy."

"The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest."

"If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other, if only I could save you all from yourselves."

"The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves."

"Someday I'll be locked up for love insanity. "She loved too much."

"I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness."

"I would say that compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity."

"No one but a woman in love ever sees the maximum of men's greatness ."

"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. 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."

"You cannot save people, you can only love them."

"Passion gives me moments of wholeness."