778 Quotes by Anais Nin

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.

I am not always just living, just following all my fantasies; I come up for air, for understanding.

Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.

Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving.

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.

Confront all the angry thoughts, feelings, the jealousies and condemnations, to find their cause, seek the root of such feelings and then operate on that. Need of security and reassurance can cause criminal acts.

Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.

Dreams are necessary to life.