"For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue — that I had to do the job myself."
AN
Anaïs Nin
61 quotes
Quotes by Anaïs Nin
"People living deeply have no fear of death."
"This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice."
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
"I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing."
"The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?"
"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."
"Dreams are necessary to life."
"I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living."
"The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself."
"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."
"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together."
"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
"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."
"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery."