Anaïs Nin

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

Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.

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.

Every individual is representative of the whole . . . and should be intimately understood, and this would give a far greater understanding of mass movements and sociology.

Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death.  He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying "You gave me the wrong key!"

It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human.  I am a woman first of all.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life. . . . To seek a total unity is wrong.  To give as much meaning to one's life as possible is right to me.

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

Dreams are necessary to life.

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.