Anais Nin - February 20 2014

 Anais Nin was born Angela Anais Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell on Feb. 21, 1903 and died on January 14, 1977.  She was an lived in France, Cuba and the United States. She was known for her journals, novels and essays, and after her death for collections of erotica she had written in the 1940's. She was married several times, at one time simultaneously. She was a great voice of women's understanding and perspective in an era of male dominance, leading the way for generations of women to speak out and live out more fully. 

Here are some quotes by Anais Nin:  

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.

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.

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.

Ordinary life does not interest me.

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

Good things happen to those who hustle.

I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ.

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

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

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.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.