On the Birthday of one of my very favorite writers, Anaïs Nin, it’s with honor I get to share some of her best and most profound quotes for Plutonic readers. She’s the queen of inspirational quotes, but few people know who Anaïs Nin was. Born in France to Cuban parents in 1903, Nin moved to New York in the 1940s and made a name for herself as a fiercely creative and unapologetic voice, who often exhibited her numerous love affairs with famous authors, including Henry Miller and Gore Vidal, in her many diaries, essays, short stories, and erotica.
“Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.”
“If you limit yourself only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.”
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
“Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul—you create suffering.”
“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.”
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
“I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.”
“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”
“
“There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.”
“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
“You don’t find love, it finds you. It’s got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what’s written in the stars.”
“I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”
