Anaïs Nin

anais

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.

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.

Passion gives me moments of wholeness.

The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.

Ordinary life does not interest me.

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.

Love never dies 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 illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before… to test your limits… to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

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.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

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

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.