WIST Quotations

Nin, Anais -- “Winter of Artifice” (1945)

Dave — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 14:08:03 +0000

To fight a real sorrow, a real loss, a real insult, a real disillusion, a real treachery was infinitely less difficult than to spend a night without sleep struggling with ghosts. The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
“Winter of Artifice” (1945)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- (Attributed)

Dave — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:00:00 +0000

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
(Attributed)

Nin, Anais -- (Attributed)

Dave — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:00:00 +0000

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.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
(Attributed)

Nin, Anais -- (Attributed)

Dave — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:00:00 +0000

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
(Attributed)

Nin, Anais -- (Attributed)

Dave — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 14:01:15 +0000

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
(Attributed)

Nin, Anais -- Collages [Varna] (1964)

Dave — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 15:29:46 +0000

Nothing endures unless it has first been transposed into a myth, and the great advantage of myths is that they are ladies with portable roots.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Collages [Varna] (1964)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- The Four-Chambered Heart (1959)

Dave — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 01:50:37 +0000

Love never dies of 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 illnesses and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never of natural death.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
The Four-Chambered Heart (1959)
(Source)

Djuna to Rango.

Nin, Anais -- The Novel of the Future, ch. 2 “Abstraction” (1968)

Dave — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 18:01:02 +0000

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
The Novel of the Future, ch. 2 “Abstraction” (1968)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1932-04)

Dave — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 19:34:55 +0000

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1932-04)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1932-11-27)

Dave — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:33:00 +0000

Now I laugh at my fear of analysis. Most people’s possession of knowledge deprives them of the sense of wonder, but such a sense of wonder and mystery is like the savage’s fear of mysterious fire until he discovers the principle of it and the mastering of it. I say that after we know all there is to know, there is still mystery and wonder of a deeper kind.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1932-11-27)
(Source)

Source of the more commonly encountered paraphrase (e.g.):

I have no fear of clarity. The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery. I have no fear of analysis. The possession of knowledge does not destroy the sense of wonder and mystery.

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1933-03)

Dave — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 20:17:55 +0000

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

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1933-03)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1934-05)

Dave — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 16:37:58 +0000

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.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1934-05)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1935-04)

Dave — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 15:28:14 +0000

The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1935-04)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1935-08)

Dave — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 19:00:00 +0000

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1935-08)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1937-03)

Dave — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 15:47:51 +0000

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.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1937-03)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1941-06)

Dave — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 19:00:00 +0000

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

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1941-06)
(Source)

In her Diaries [ed. Stuhlmann (1969)].

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1943-04)

Dave — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 16:57:07 +0000

What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no drug and no alcohol to equal it.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1943-04)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1943, Fall)

Dave — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 17:29:41 +0000

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1943, Fall)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1945-06)

Dave — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:45:42 +0000

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.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1945-06)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1946-04)

Dave — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 17:24:38 +0000

Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1946-04)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1947-02)

Dave — Fri, 25 May 2018 22:34:16 +0000

Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It creates the failures. 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.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1947-02)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1947-02)

Dave — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 17:33:14 +0000

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1947-02)
(Source)

Nin, Anais -- Diary (1957, Spring)

Dave — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 22:27:02 +0000

Big Business and Politics are twins, they are the monsters who kill everything, corrupt everything.

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) Catalan-Cuban-French author, diarist
Diary (1957, Spring)
(Source)