There have been many authors throughout the course of time that has managed to carve out their own legacies, Anais Nin is one of those famous authors. Born on 21 February 1903, Nin got famous for writing captivating short stories and novels, all of which were inspired by her own personal life. So in a way, she got famous by telling her own life story through indirect means, which not a lot of people can achieve.
If we carefully examine her writing, we can see that many of them were actually inspired by the Surrealist movement- this was the literature and visual art movement between World War 1 and World War 2 time period. Surrealism wasn’t a negative movement, it was in fact a positive expression. This movement actually promoted positive art.
Anais was actually brought to America, to settle down and education but she eventually returned to Europe. Her publication of the famous novel D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study not only kick-started her career but was also the reason for her friendship with the author Henry Miller.
Anais Nin’s Motivational Quotes and Sayings
1. “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
2. “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.”
3. “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 naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
4. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
5. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
6. “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.”
7. “How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?”
8. “I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as the reason. 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.”
9. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
10. “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.”
11. “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”
12. “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.”
13. “I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”
14. “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.”
15. “Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”
16. “I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.”
17. “The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
18. “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.”
19. “You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): the absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”
20. “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.”
21. “Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman’s womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. Women may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she is bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When a man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child-rearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to be. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but at the moment man rests inside of her.”
22. “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.”
23. “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.”
24. “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.”
25. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
26. “The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”
27. “I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise, I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don’t say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. 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 is broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world, and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.”
28. “People living deeply have no fear of death.”
29. “Do not seek the because – in love, there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
30. “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.”
31. “Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.”
32. “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.”
33. “I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.”
34. “The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.”
35. “Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying ‘You gave me the wrong key!”
36. “Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.”
37. “You cannot save people. You can only love them.”
38. “I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.”
39. “Question: I am interested in so many things, and I have a terrible fear because my mother keeps telling me that I’m just going to be exploring the rest of my life and never get anything done. But I find it really hard to set my ways and say, “Well, do I want to do this, or should I try to exploit that, or should I escape and completely do one thing?”
Anaïs Nin: One word I would banish from the dictionary is ‘escape.’ Just banish that and you’ll be fine. Because that word has been misused regarding anybody who wanted to move away from a certain spot and wanted to grow. He was an escapist. You know if you forget that word you will have a much easier time. Also, you’re in the prime, the beginning of your life; you should experiment with everything, try everything… We are taught all these dichotomies, and I only learned later that they could work in harmony. We have created false dichotomies; we create false ambivalences, and very painful one’s sometimes -the feeling that we have to choose. But I think at one point we finally realize, sometimes subconsciously, whether or not we are really fitted for what we try and if it’s what we want to do.
You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you’re not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn’t a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.”
40. “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.”
41. “What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.”
42. “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.”
43. “Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become a woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child’s blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality…I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.”
44. “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.”
45. “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.”
46. “I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.”
47. “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.”
48. “I write emotional algebra.”
49. “I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”
50. “I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.”
51. “Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.”
52. “Dreams are necessary to live.”
53. “The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”
54. “Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.”
55. “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.”
56. “What I cannot love, I overlook.”
57. “Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.”
58. “I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.”
59. “Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.”
60. “Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruit, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.”
61. “She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.”
62. “The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.”
63. “Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.”
64. “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.”
65. “You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You will always be a part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we shared, at some moment, the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.”
66. “I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.”
67. “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”
68. “He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.”
69. “In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.”
70. “I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
71. “To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.”
72. “In the chaos, there is fertility.”
73. “Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.”
74. “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.”
75. “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.”
76. “There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.”
77. “I want to make my own discoveries…….penetrate the evil which attracts me”.
78. “Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.”
79. “I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning, and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.”
80. “When does real love begin?
At first, it was a fire, eclipses, short circuits, lightning, and fireworks; the incense, hammocks, drugs, wines, perfumes; then spasm and honey, fever, fatigue, warmth, currents of liquid fire, feast and orgies; then dreams, visions, candlelight, flowers, pictures; then images out of the past, fairy tales, stories, then pages out of a book, a poem; then laughter, then chastity.
At what moment does the knife wound sink so deep that the flesh begins to weep with love?
At first power, power, then the wound, and love, and love and fears, and the loss of the self, and the gift, and slavery. At first, I ruled, loved less; then more, then slavery. Slavery to his image, his odor, the craving, the hunger, the thirst, the obsession.”
81. “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
82. “Our life is composed greatly of dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.”
83. “I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.”
84. “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.”
85. “I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.”
86. “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.”
87. “When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.”
88. “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.”
89. “life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat.”
90. “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.”
91. “I have no brakes on…analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life.”
92. “When your beauty struck me, it dissolved me. Deep down, I am not different from you. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. I see in you that part of me which is you. I surrender my sincerity because if I love you it means we share the same fantasies, we share the same madness.”
93. “When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.”
94. “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 is broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.”
95. “This diary is my kief, hashish, and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.”
96. “We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.”
97. “I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.”
98. “Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.”
99. “You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you’re not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn’t a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.”
100. “To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break myself. I want to live only for ecstasy. I’m neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous – lava, inflammable, unrestrained.”
101. “Stories do not end.”
102. “Passion gives me moments of wholeness”
103. “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.”
104. “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.”
105. “Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”
Anais Nin’s Early Career
Nin’s mother took her to New York City in 1914, where she went to school. Later, she went back to Europe. Her first book, D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, came out in 1932. It led to a lifelong friendship between her and the American author Henry Miller. Her writing shows how the Surrealist movement and the psychoanalysis she learned from Otto Rank affected her.
Nin went back to New York City at the start of World War II. There, she kept printing and publishing her novels and short stories at her own cost, and even though critics didn’t like them, many of the best writers of the time admired her work. Not until 1966, when the first volume of her diaries came out, did she become known as an important writer. Cities of the Interior, a five-volume roman-fleuve that includes Ladders to Fire (1946), Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), A Spy in the House of Love (1954), and Solar Barque (1959), became popular after the success of the diary (1958).
Nin And Controversy
Nin’s literary work was controversial while she was alive and has stayed that way since she died. Many critics liked how she showed femininity in a unique way, as well as her lyrical style and psychological insight. Some people thought that her desire to be happy was self-centered and narcissistic. The posthumous book Delta of Venus: Erotica (1977) and later collections of erotic stories written on commission when money was tight in the early 1940s also caused people to have different ideas.
Anais Nin’s Famous Work
Her most notable work includes
- A Spy in the House of Love
- Cities of the Interior
- D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study
- Delta of Venus: Erotica
- Four-Chambered Heart
- The Ladders to Fire
- Solar Barque
Her other works of fiction were a collection of short stories called Under a Glass Bell (1944), the novels House of Incest (1936), Seduction of the Minotaur (1961), and Collages (1964), and a collection of three novelettes called Winter of Artifice (1965). (1939).
Recap
Anais Nin died late Friday night in a Los Angeles hospital. She was a brilliant and original writer who explored the inner landscapes of the mind in a series of sensitively written diaries she kept for decades. She turned 73.
Even though her surrealist explorations of the subconscious were often too confusing for the general public, she seemed to be gaining popularity in recent years among young people and those who liked her vivid expressions of a woman’s point of view.
She wrote works that were very delicate and beautiful, but she was also a very determined woman. When she couldn’t find a publisher in the 1940s, she bought a foot-powered press and printed her own work.
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