Anais Nin

Anais Nin
Anaïs Ninwas an essayist and memoirist born to Cuban parents in France, where she was also raised. She spent some time in Spain and Cuba but lived most of her life in the United States where she became an established author. She wrote journals, novels, critical studies, essays, short stories, and erotica. A great deal of her work, including Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published posthumously...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 February 1903
CityNanterre, France
CountryUnited States of America
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
I am apparently gentle, unstable, and full of pretenses. I will die a poet killed by the nonpoets, will renounce no dream, resign myself to no ugliness, accept nothing of the world but the one I made myself. I wrote, lived, loved like Don Quixote, and on the day of my death I will say: ‘Excuse me, it was all a dream,’ and by that time I may have found one who will say: ‘Not at all, it was true, absolutely true.’
Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.
Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.
Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.
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.
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
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.
Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
Dreams are essential to life.
The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.
Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.