Anaïs Nin Quotes

“I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.”
― Anaïs Nin

“The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“Every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room.”
― Anaïs Nin, Little Birds

“I owe a huge debt to Anaïs Nin, because I fell into her diaries, essays, and collected letters in my Twenties and Thirties like a fish falling into water. She was, in some ways, a deeply flawed human being, and perhaps she makes a strange kind of hero for someone like me, committed to the ethical and spiritual dimensions of my craft as well as to the technical ones, but a hero and strong influence she remains nonetheless.

Source: Her blog.”
― Terri Windling

“She wants to flow out, and here her love lies coiled inside and choking her, because her father is her double, her shadow, and she does not know which one is real. One of them must die so that the other may find the boundaries of himself.”
― Anaïs Nin, Winter of Artifice

“But of that instant I knew my wife was right, knew that I had made a grave mistake. In that moment I sensed the leech that Anaïs had tried to get rid of. I saw the spoiled child, the man who had never done an honest stroke of work in his life, the destitute individual who was too proud to beg openly but was not above milking a friend dry. I knew it all, felt it all, and already foresaw the end.”
― Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch