Life & Wisdom Quote by Anais Nin

Nin’s line lands like a deliberate contradiction: she argues it’s “all right” for a woman to be “above all, human,” then snaps the hierarchy back into place - “I am a woman first of all.” That tension is the point. She’s writing from a century that treated “human” as the default property of men, while “woman” was a category, a deviation, a specialization. Saying it’s “all right” isn’t meekness; it’s a jab at the fact that women needed permission to claim full personhood in the first place.

The subtext is classic Nin: identity as both prison and material. She refuses the tidy, liberal solution where gender disappears into a neutral “human,” because she knows neutrality has historically meant male. At the same time, she won’t accept “woman” as a limiting role defined by others. “Woman first” reads less like essentialism than insistence: I won’t become legible only by translating myself into the terms of the universal.

Context matters. Nin’s diaries and fiction are built on interiority, sensuality, and self-mythmaking - all politically charged when women were expected to be moral symbols, not complicated narrators of their own desire. The quote stages a negotiation between two feminist impulses: the demand for equal membership in the human race and the refusal to erase the lived, gendered texture of experience to get it. It works because it exposes the trap: you’re told to be “just human,” but only after you’ve been reminded you’re not the default.