"Everything but happiness is neurosis."
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Quote collection
Anais Nin quotes (page 9 of 26)
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"Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life."
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"Expressing feelings is linked directly with creation... In this ability to tap the sources of feeling and imagination lies the secret of abundance."
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"I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all. . ."
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"The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams."
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"If I fall asleep, it is because I am overloaded. I sleep because one hour with Henry contains five years of my life, and one phrase, one caress answers the expectations of a hundred nights. When I hear him laugh, I say, "I have heard Rabelais.". And I swallow his laughter like bread and wine."
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"In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again."
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"I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ"
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"This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice."
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"His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that...only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it."
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"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."
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"Write. Write until it stops hurting."
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"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason."
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"I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison."
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"My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living."
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"The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything."
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"I am apparently gentle, unstable, and full of pretenses. I will die a poet killed by the nonpoets, will renounce no dream, resign myself to no ugliness, accept nothing of the world but the one I made myself. I wrote, lived, loved like Don Quixote, and on the day of my death I will say: ‘Excuse me, it was all a dream,’ and by that time I may have found one who will say: ‘Not at all, it was true, absolutely true.’"
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"My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living."
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"You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers - you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance."
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"Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again."
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