The collection / 221 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1940 AD

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.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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02c. 1940 AD

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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03c. 1940 AD

How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?

Anaïs Nin / quote

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04c. 1940 AD

She lacks the core of sureness, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on reflections of herself in others' eyes. She does not dare to be herself.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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05c. 1940 AD

Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress , my hairdresser, my make-up, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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06c. 1940 AD

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.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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07c. 1940 AD

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.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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08c. 1940 AD

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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09c. 1940 AD

I see enormous loves growing immense and finally crushing me.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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10c. 1940 AD

I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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11c. 1940 AD

One does not learn to suffer less but to dodge pain.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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12c. 1940 AD

Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key!

Anaïs Nin / quote

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13c. 1940 AD

What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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14c. 1940 AD

Before, as soon as I came home from all sorts of places I would sit down and write in my journal. Now I want to write you, talk with you... I love when you say all that happens is good, it is good. I say all that happens is wonderful. For me it is all symphonic, and I am so aroused by living - god, Henry, in you alone I have found the same swelling of enthusiasm, the same quick rising of the blood, the fullness... Before, I almost used to think there was something wrong. Everybody else seemed to have the brakes on... I never feel the brakes. I overflow. And when I feel your excitement about life flaring, next to mine, then it makes me dizzy.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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15c. 1940 AD

He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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16c. 1940 AD

Down the rusty bars of ladders to the undergrounds of the night propitious to the first man and woman at the beginning of the world. where there were no words by which to possess each other, no music for serenades, no presents to court with, no tournaments to impress and force a yielding, no secondary instruments, no adornments, necklaces, crowns to subdue, but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous, impaling of a woman on a man´s sensual mast

Anaïs Nin / quote

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17c. 1940 AD

I am made only for passion; it is the temperature of love that I cannot endure. I am afraid, and I think it is death- everything but passion seems like death to me. Only in fever do I feel life.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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18c. 1940 AD

They clutch and cling and howl when I leave them, but how badly they love.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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19c. 1940 AD

I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essentially human, not intellectual. I do not understand abstract act. Only art born of love, passion, pain.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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20c. 1940 AD

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.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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21c. 1940 AD

I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from a man's and for which man's language was so inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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22c. 1940 AD

Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods,no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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23c. 1940 AD

Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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24c. 1940 AD

He had never seen her body so abandoned, so unconscious of all but the desire to be taken and satisfied. She bloomed under his caresses, no longer the girl but the woman already being born.

Anaïs Nin / quote

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