Anais Nin

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.

The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.

I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

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.

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

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.

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.

There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.

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.

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.

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.

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

We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

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

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

When one is pretending the entire body revolts.