Anaïs Nin

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

The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy... and intimacy creates understanding... and understanding creates love.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

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