Life & Wisdom Quote by Anais Nin

Travel here isn’t a hobby or a postcard genre; it’s an appetite. Anais Nin frames movement as an ongoing craving for alternate selves, hinting that the real destination is psychic, not geographic. The line’s sly provocation is that “some of us” don’t travel to learn about the world so much as to negotiate an instability within it: the feeling that one life, one city, one identity is never quite enough.

The phrasing “other states, other lives, other souls” escalates like a private confession. “States” can be read as places, but also as moods, mental weather, erotic temperatures. “Lives” suggests the performative flexibility Nin both celebrated and was accused of romanticizing: the possibility of remaking oneself through new contexts, new lovers, new stories. “Souls” pulls the search into intimacy and myth, implying that travel is also a hunger for recognition, for the right witness, for the person who unlocks a version of you that can’t surface at home.

Nin wrote from a 20th-century modernist orbit where psychoanalysis, expatriate culture, and sexual candor blurred the line between exploration and escape. Her diaristic voice made interior life an adventure plot, and this sentence carries that signature: yearning elevated into philosophy. The subtext is both liberating and slightly damning. Forever-travel can be spiritual courage, or it can be an elegant way to avoid staying still long enough to be fully known. Either way, the quote works because it refuses the tourist fantasy and replaces it with something riskier: reinvention as a form of motion.