Anais Nin

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."

"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."

"Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions."

"Dreams are necessary to life."

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

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

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

"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 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."

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

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."

"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."

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

"People living deeply have no fear of death."

"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."

"The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself."

"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic."

"Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country."

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

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