A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

— Anaïs Nin

Ali Baba protects the lovers! Gives them the luck of bandits, and no guilt, for love fills certain people and expands them beyond all laws; there is no time, no place for regrets, hesitations, cowardice. Love runs free and reckless, and all the gentle rockeries perpetrated to protect others from its burns-those who are not the lovers but who might be the victims of this love's expansion.

— Anaïs Nin

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.

— Anaïs Nin

Although I was so big, and so rough in many ways, loved hunting, fighting, horseback riding, I loved the piano above everything else... The mountain man's obsession is to get a glimpse of the sea.

— Anaïs Nin

Am I creating my own isolation? It seems to me that most of my acts are acts of integrity. So much takes place within me each day that by comparison I find a paucity, a stinginess, a silence in people which drives me to excess.

— Anaïs Nin

And in his eyes he had the look of the cat who inspires a desire to caress but loves no one, who never feels he must respond to the impulses he arouses.

— Anaïs Nin

And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity...

— Anaïs Nin

And silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxication life, instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions, mathematics of emotion in place of violent impact, the volcanic eruptions of fever, lust and delight.

— Anaïs Nin

And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon. What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.

— Anaïs Nin

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

— Anaïs Nin