"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage" - Anaïs Nin

via The Fausto Rocks Yeah

Today is Anaïs Nin’s birthday. 

She would have been 112 years old.

If you aren't familiar, Nin was a French/Cuban author who lived from February 21, 1903 till January 14, 1977.

She is known for her feminism and eroticism. 

For her novels and her diaries that she kept for 60+ years from the age of eleven until her death.

For her passionate love affair and friendship with fellow author Henry Miller as well as several other literary figures.

Her words have always touched my heart and spoken directly to my soul.

So I thought it would be fitting for this weekend’s post to be a carefully curated collection of some of my most cherished Nin quotes that have sparked something real and powerful in me and hopefully they will do the same for you.

“You cannot save people. You can only love them.”

“The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

“Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”

"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."

“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.”

via brainpickings

“We don’t have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.”

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”

"I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically." ( from a letter to Henry Miller)

“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.” 

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

“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.”

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.”

via the long haul project

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”

“From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.”

“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”

“We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.”

“I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.”

“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”

I sincerely hope that the quotes I have shared in this post have stirred something within and encourage you to explore her works further.

love & light

-Katie