Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Anais Nin Novelist

  • Gender: Female
  • Citizenship: United States
  • Born: Feb 21, 1903
  • Died: Jan 14, 1977

Anaïs Nin was an author born to Cuban parents in France, where she was also raised. She spent some time in Spain and Cuba but lived most of her life in the United States where she became an established author. She wrote journals, novels, critical studies, essays, short stories, and erotica. A great deal of her work, including Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published posthumously.

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

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.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

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

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

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

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

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

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

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Good things happen to those who hustle.

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.

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Dreams are necessary to life.

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

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

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

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

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