Anaïs Nin

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.

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

People living deeply have no fear of death.

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.

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 only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

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

-Anaïs Nin