Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you

Anaïs Nin

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

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.

Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.

You cannot save people; you can only love them.

If you limit yourself only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul—you create suffering.

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.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

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.

Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic. 

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.

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

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.

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

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

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. 

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Dreams are necessary to life.

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

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. 

Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions. 

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

HAPPY BIRTHDAY Anaïs Nin born on this day Anaïs Nin, (born February 21, 1903, Neuilly, France—died January 14, 1977, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), French-born author of novels and short stories whose literary reputation rests on the eight published volumes of her personal diaries.