Eye-Opening Anaïs Nin Quotes & Biography

She is a French-Cuban writer and memoirist, Angela Anais. It was when she was just 11 years old that she found what she loved to write. She is better known as “Anais Nin.” This is what no one else was able to do at the time she worked. Anais had a very interesting life. She wrote diaries, short stories, journals, essays, and erotica, among other things. 

She was born into a family of artists, so it’s clear that she was always creative. Bold and angry in appearance, she wrote without fear, based mostly on her own experiences. Her complicated love life almost always led to new rumors and made her past look bad. Yet, she didn’t let the gossip about her life bother her. She kept writing for literature. Anais Nin Quotes are also very famous in the whole world.

• 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

• We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. — Anais Nin

• 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. — Anais Nin

• We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. — Anais Nin

• Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. — Anais Nin

• 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. — 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

• Dreams are necessary to life. — 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.

• “There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.” ― Anais Nin

• “I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.” ― Anais Nin

• Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age. — Anais Nin

• “Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s. ” ― Anaïs Nin

• The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery. — 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

• “For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love.” ― Anais Nin

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

• I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. — Anais Nin

• Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat. — Anais Nin

• People living deeply have no fear of death. — Anais Nin

• Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together. — Anais Nin

• “You don’t find love, it finds you. It’s got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what’s written in the stars.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “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.” ― Anaïs Nin

• We write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospection. — Anais Nin

• There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. — Anais Nin

• “We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.” ― Anaïs Nin

• 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. — Anais Nin

• “When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.” ― Anaïs Nin

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

• Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living. — Anais Nin]

• Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, and no solutions. — Anais Nin

• Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live. — Anais Nin

• Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it. — Anais Nin

• There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do. — Anais Nin
  

• “Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “Passion gives me moments of wholeness” ― Anaïs Nin

• “I’m awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” ― Anaïs Nin

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

• It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it. —- Anais Nin

• “Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.” ― Anais Nin

• “Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “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.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.” ― Anais Nin

• “When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self.” ― Anais Nin

• “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” ― Anais Nin

• “Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.” ― Anaïs Nin

• A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked. — Anais Nin

• “I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits” ― Anaïs Nin

• I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern. — Anais Nin

• “To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.” ― Anaïs Nin

• Truth is something which can’t be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning. — Anais Nin

• “I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.” ― Anais Nin

• My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living. — Anais Nin

• The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle. — Anais Nin

• It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all. — 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 only abnormality is the incapacity to love. — Anais Nin
• “There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.” ― Anaïs Nin
• “What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.” ― Anaïs Nin
• “I write emotional algebra.” ― Anais Nin
• What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship? — Anais Nin
• If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way. — Anais Nin
• “Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.” ― — Anaïs Nin

• “From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.” ― Anais Nin
• “I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.” ― anaïs nin
• When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others. — Anais Nin
• The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless. — Anais Nin
• 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

• “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ― Anais Nin

• “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.” ― Anais Nin

• “I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ” ― Anais Nin

• “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.” ― Anais Nin
• “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.” ― Anaïs Nin
• “I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.” ― Anais Nin

• “There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.” ― Anais Nin

• “The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.” ― Anais Nin

• “Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “You cannot save people. You can only love them.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.” ― Anais Nin

• “Good things happen to those who hustle.” ― Anais Nin

• “We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.” ― Anais Nin

• “What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.” ― Anais Nin

• “If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “In my childhood diary I wrote: “I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before… to test yout limits… to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossum.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “I’m sick of my own romanticism!” ― Anais Nin

• “I know why familles were created, with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.” ― Anais Nin

• “If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses” ― Anaïs Nin
• “I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ― Anaïs Nin

• “Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.” ― Anais Nin

Related Topics: Alexander Graham Bell Quotes and William Shakespeare Quotes. 

Anaïs Nin Biography

Childhood and early life

When Anais was born on February 21, 1903, she was the daughter of a composer named Joaquin Nin and a Cuban classical singer named Rosa Culmell. She was born in France. Following the breakup of her parents, she and her mother moved to Spain and then the United States. At school in the United States, she only went to school until she was 16. Then she dropped out, started working as a model for artists, and started dancing as well. However, as a student, she was very good. Anais Nin quotes are also very popular in the young generation. She quickly learned to speak and write in English, both written and spoken, and at the same time, she kept her French roots.

Early career

Hugh Parker Guiler was an established banker and experimental film maker when Anais fell in love with him at the age of 20 in Cuba. They got married and had a son. Her writing began in the late 1920s. A year after they got married, they moved to Paris and she started writing in that time. She wrote her first book in just 16 days. It was called “D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study,” and it was about the author. In the mid-1930s, she kept a lot of diaries. They were full of heartfelt statements of love and intimate conversations between the famous American author, Henry miller, and herself.

Before the Second World War, it took a long time to get her books out there, so in 1935, she helped start a publishing company in France called Siana Editions. In 1939, she left Paris with Hugh because the French government wanted its citizens to leave the country before the war. They moved to New York. At the Gotham Book Mart in New York, Frances Steloff kept all of her written material safe. The first time she wrote erotica was in the 1940s, for a collector in the district who paid her $1 a page.

Gradual Recognition

She was 44 years old when she met Rupert Pole in an elevator at Manhattan. He was young and sexy. She was on her way to a party when the two met and fell in love right away. In 1955, she married Pole in a secret. It is said that Guiler didn’t know about the marriage between Anais and Pole. It is also said that he didn’t know about the marriage, but he did know that his wife had an affair with Pole. Thus, she began her double life, which she says is “filled with lies.” Anais wrote about this in one of her diaries. She said that she was often so caught up in lies that she had to keep two chequebooks, one for Los Angeles and one for New York. She had to tell so many lies and keep track of where she said what so that people wouldn’t turn against her. Most of it she wrote down so they wouldn’t.

The two events that changed Anais Nin’s life and got her a lot of attention didn’t happen until 1966, but they did. Legal issues led to her getting married to Pole in the first place, and the first time her diary volumes came out was when they came out. After 1966, she gained a lot of attention as a writer, and she encouraged people to look into her earlier works, which led to a lot of success for her writing.

Reel Appearances

When her husband was an experimental filmmaker, he also exposed her to the world of film. She starred in a lot of movies during her career. The movies she has been in include Maya Deren’s film, “Ritual in Transfigured Time” (1946), “Bells of Atlantis” (1952), “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” (1954), and a few of her husbands’ movies. She also starred in a few of her husband’s movies.

Major work

Anais Nin is known as one of the most daring female writers of erotica because she was able to portray both “masculine” and “feminine” characters very well. She was one of the few people who didn’t have a problem putting herself in the erotica category. There were a lot of people who thought the volumes of her diary were very good literature. However, it was not just her journals that were later praised. Her novels were also praised later on. She wrote a book called “Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin,” which was very controversial. It said that she was bisexual, which she later denied. In the book, June, who was Henry’s wife, is talked about in a way that shows unrequited love.

In the book, she talks about her problems with love. She talks about her husband, Hugh, and her boyfriend, Miller, as well as her problems with love. She often wrote characters who screamed about the problems she had with her own feelings. In 1936, she wrote a 72-page book called “House of Incest.” In it, she vividly told stories about her father that showed how they had an inappropriate physical relationship. When the book was first released, her father was afraid of how much and how he would be abused in front of everyone. However, in this book, she didn’t write as much as she usually does.

Awards and accomplishments

In the 1930s, Anais Nin was part of the surrealist movement. In the 1940s, she was a part of the Avant Garde movement. In the 1960s, she was a part of the feminist movement. The “Philadelphia College of Art” gave her a doctorate in 1973 because of her social and literary activism. This was because she made a contribution to literature. Owing to her fearless use of emotions and her ability to write heartfelt stories, she joined the United States National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974.

Personal history and legacy

When she married Pole again in 1966, the marriage was annulled. She lived with him until her death, and he had all the rights to her literary works, so he published many of her novels that she hadn’t written herself. When she died in 1977, she had been battling cancer for almost three years. She died in LA on January 14, 1977. She was 74. She was raised as a Roman-Catholic, but she wanted to cremate her body instead of bury it in the ground. Her ashes were scattered over the Santa Monica Bay in Mermaid Cove, which is near the Santa Monica Bay.