I love her for what she dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed by it.
— Anais Nin

Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously.
— Anais Nin

Why am I obsessed with a few persons only? Why are my devotions so concentrated on a few people? I do not spread out as most people do. I do not really confide in many people, then they do not know me, and then I quickly surmise they do not understand and love me. On the few people I feel connected with, I pour a lavish devotion. And yet it seems to me that this must cease. The more broadly and expansively I love, without exclusiveness, the more I reach the mystic whole, the larger sense of love, the less individualistic, the more universal love.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol.2: 1934-1939

Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.
— Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin, Henry and June


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.
Anaïs Nin

You discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom, absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an illness- monotony, boredom, and death. Millions live like this, or die like this, without knowing. And then some shock treatment takes place- a person, a book, a song, and then it awakens them and saves them from death.
— Anaïs Nin

I am at one with a sea of sensations, glitter, silk, skin, eyes, mouths, desire.
— Anaïs Nin

I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.
Anaïs Nin


You cannot save people. You can only love them.
Anaïs Nin