"I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have shared my kingdom with you."
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Quote collection
Anais Nin quotes (page 17 of 26)
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"The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others."
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"I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery."
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"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage "People living deeply have no fear of death."
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"Either one fails in one's art or in one's life."
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"The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself."
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"The shell is America's most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early."
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"To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living."
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"The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body."
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"I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension"
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"I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again. ANAÏS NIN, Fire: From "A Journal of Love" The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1938 For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration."
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"She was fully, painfully aware that very rarely did midnight strike in two hearts at once, very rarely did midnight arouse two different equal desires, and that any dislocation in this, any indifference, was an indication of disunity, of the difficulties, the impossibilities of fusion between two human beings."
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"Paris-New York, the two high tension magnetic poles between life, life of the senses, of the spirit in Paris, and life in action in New York."
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"The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure."
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"There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through."
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"Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold."
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"I find that life, day by day, is composed of at least one joy, one problem and one sorrow. Then there are the smaller ingredients: you always learn something, whether useful or harmful - that is difficult to analyze until later; you always give something; you alwayou always grow a little in one direction or another."
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"That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe."
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"Nowhere is inhumanity more revealed than in hospitals."
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"The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted."
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