Anais Nin

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

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

"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. "

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. "

"If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation. "

"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. "

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

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. "

"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love. "

"Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country. "

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

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

"When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others. "