Anais Nin

Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.

The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it. He hopes to impose his particular vision and share it with others. And when the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
We also write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing, as the primitives dance their rituals. 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. When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.

You cannot save people, you can only love them.

We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.

I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.

The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.

Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.

I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.

By shutting out the outside world, drugs place one not only in confrontation with the dreaming self, but also ones nightmares.

The times in his studio when he washed his hands and they smoked, for his hands were so warm and the water so cold.

Someday I'll be locked up for love insanity. "She loved too much."

Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage.

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

Most fiction writers uses dreams decoratively without relating them to daily life, but the contemporary writer is becoming more expert at detecting the influence of one upon the other.

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.

Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment.

To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.

Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.

Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and to art.