Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell (1903–77,) known simply as Anaïs Nin, was a French-born American novelist, diarist, and artist.
Born in Neuilly, France, Nin studied psychoanalysis and was a patient of Carl Jung. Influenced by the erotica of Surrealism in the 1930s, she wrote the novel House of Incest (1936,) the five-volume novel sequence Cities of the Interior (1947–54,) and erotica in Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979.)
Nin wrote in obscurity for much of her life. Her writing went mostly unappreciated outside her artistic circle. Her anonymity changed when her introspective diaries started to be published in 1966.
Nin’s autobiographical seven-volume The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1966–80) portrayed the development of an artistic female self in the twentieth century. Her diaries struck a chord with readers during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and elevated her to the status of a cult figure.
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Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should reserve it.
—Anais Nin
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Love
I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. to enter ordinary relationships, I want ecstacy. I am a neurotic- in the sense that i live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
—Anais Nin
we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
—Anais Nin
We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Perception, Knowledge, Awareness, Perspective, Attitude
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Friendship, Love
What I cannot love, I overlook.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Friendship
the personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
—Anais Nin
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
—Anais Nin
And the day came when the risk to remain tight
in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
—Anais Nin
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Self-Discovery, Life
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.
—Anais Nin
Topics: Action
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