Anais Nin

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

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.

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.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

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 naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

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

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

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

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.

A war regarded as inevitable or even probable and therefore much prepared for has a very good chance of eventually being fought.