"To love and to labor is the sum of living."
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Quote collection
Anais Nin quotes (page 26 of 26)
520 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It amazes me that you feel that each time you write a story you give away one of your dreams and you feel the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love. How is this world made which you enjoy, the friends around me that you love? They came because I first gave away my stories."
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"I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman"
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"I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing."
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"I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly."
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"I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self."
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"In every relationship, sooner or later, there is a court scene. Accusations, counter-accusations, a trial, a verdict."
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"Too late for changes, too late perhaps for explanations and ideological webs, but the love goes on, the love goes on, blind to laws and warnings and even to wisdom and to fears. And whatever that love is, perhaps an illusion of a new love, I want it, I cant resist it, my whole being melts in one kiss, my knowledge melts, my fears melt, my blood dances, my legs open."
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"I love man as creator, lover, husband, friend, but man the father I do not trust. I do not believe in man as father. I do not trust man as father."
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"We efface an hour by passionate love, without twists, without aftertaste. When it is finished, it is not finished, we lie still in each other's arms lulled by our love, by tenderness -- sensuality in which the whole being can participate."
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"At first she beckoned and lured one into her world; then, she blurred the passageways, confused all the images, as if to elude detection."
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"And silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxication life, instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions, mathematics of emotion in place of violent impact, the volcanic eruptions of fever, lust and delight."
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"We sit on the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds."
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"Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it."
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"Houses turn to corpses overnight when we cease to live and love in them."
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"I am quite wiling to confide entirely in human being, except that at some moment or another human beings get preoccupied, moody, busy, inattentive, and there come an end to the interest, and this never happens in a journal!"
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"I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving."
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"I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced."
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"One may gain one truth at the expense of another."
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"We see things the way we are, not the way they are."
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