Anais Nin Quotes About Life
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Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality....I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.
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I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
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Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
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It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
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The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
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Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
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My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
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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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Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
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One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap is the most difficult to make - to part with one's faith, one's love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.
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To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.
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Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
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And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
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Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
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Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
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I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
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The risk it takes to remain tight inside the bud is more painful than the risk it takes to blossom. We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
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You cannot save people. You can only love them.
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Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
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Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
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Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
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The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
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I know why families were created with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.
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To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard. If one changes internally one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one's mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use.
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Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me. I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
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We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.
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The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.
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People living deeply have no fear of death.
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There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
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Dreams are necessary to life.
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