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.”

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”

“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.”

“I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”

“People living deeply have no fear of death.”

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

“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.”

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

“Dreams are necessary to life.”

“Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.”

“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.”

“What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?”

“Good things happen to those who hustle.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”