Anais Nin

Anais Nin

Writer, Diarist

Anais Nin was a French-Cuban-American diarist and writer known for her exploration of love, identity, and the human psyche in works like 'Delta of Venus'.

Life Men Writing Love Dream Inspirational
Born
February 21, 1903
Died
January 14, 1977
Quotes
520
Rank
#72

Quote collection

Anais Nin quotes (page 18 of 26)

520 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Anais Nin Writer, Diarist
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"The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelation of emotions; the hunger for frontiers against which we might learn as upon closed doors before we proceed forward; the struggle against diffusion, new beginnings, against finality in acts without finality or end, in our cursedly repercussive being."

Pain Memories Struggle
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"Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine."

Music Writing Wine
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"Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments."

Beautiful Makeup Thinking
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"Descendants of pigeons once fed by Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin and many other famous lovers are still being fed, and the sudden sound when they all rise together, frightened away, is like the sound of giant sails flapping."

Venice Together Sound
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"There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection."

Cancer Silence Joy
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"the best way to remember a beautiful city or a beautiful painting is to eat something while you are looking at it. The flavor really helps the image to penetrate the body. It fixes it as lacquer does a drawing."

Beautiful Drawing Cities
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"Our psychological reality, which lies below the surface, frightens us because it endlessly surprises us and drives us in a direction which society's rules and organizations define as wrong or dangerous."

Lying Reality Organization
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"I have a prejudice against people with money. I have known so many, and none have escaped the corruption of power. In this I am a purist. I love people motivated by love and not by power. If you have money and power, and are motivated by love, you give it all away."

Love You Power People
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"Secrets. Need to disguise. The novel was born of this."

Secret Needs Born
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"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."

Essence Silence Secret
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"He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it."

Heartbreak Betrayal Fall
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"Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met."

Book Light People
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"jazz is the expression of America's romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force."

Music Self Expression
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"New York seems conducted by jazz, animated by it. It is essentially a city of rhythm."

New York Cities Jazz
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"Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death"

Imagination Body Idealism
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"I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams."

Dream Unique Bird
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"I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself."

Friendship Cute Best Friend Enough
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"I looked at it [revolver] as if it reminded me of a crime I had committed with an irrepressible smile such as rises sometimes to people’s lips in the face of great catastrophes which are beyond their grasp, the smile that comes at times on certain women’s faces while they are saying they regret the harm they have done. It is the smile of nature quietly and proudly asserting its natural right to kill."

Regret People Done
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