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1f15bf6
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If a person continues to see only giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of a child.
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Anaïs Nin |
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fcd0b2c
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Men can be in love with literary figures, with poetic and mythological figures, but let them meet with Artemis, with Venus, with any of the goddesses of love, and then they start hurling moral judgments.
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morality
love
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Anaïs Nin |
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44dbe33
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The light was crude. It made Artaud's eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over his forehead. He has the actor's nimbleness and quickness of gestures. His face is lean, as if ravaged by fevers. His eyes do not seem to see the people. They are the eyes of a visionary. His hands are long, long-fingered. Beside him All..
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heartthrob
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Anaïs Nin |
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52ad086
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I have always been tormented by the image of multiplicity of selves. Some days I call it richness, and other days I see it as a disease, a proliferation as dangerous as cancer. My first concept about people around me was that all of them were coordinated into a WHOLE, whereas I was made up of a multitude of selves, of fragments.
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Anaïs Nin |
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cf942b4
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For love it is never the same. What goes on inside is never the same just like this music which changes every instant. For love there are a million variations, a million nights, a million days, contrasts in moods, in textures, whims, a million gestures colored by emotion, by sorrow, joy, fear, courage, triumph, by revelations which deepen the groove, creations which expand its dimensions, sharpen its penetrations. Love is vast enough to inc..
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Anaïs Nin |
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f050f4d
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But I am not sure what this self is. For the moment I seem to be busy tearing down what I was.
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Anaïs Nin |
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6436251
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All of my creation is an effort to weave a web of connection with the world: I am always weaving it because it was once broken.
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Anaïs Nin |
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ad9d346
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The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery. Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our..
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Anaïs Nin |
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b5be30b
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I would tell him how he almost made us lose interest in passion by his obsession with the gestures empty of their emotions, and how we reviled him, because he almost caused us to take vows of chastity, because what he wanted us to exclude was our own aphrodisiac--poetry.
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Anaïs Nin |
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b584dca
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Talk--half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman--like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally,..
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Anaïs Nin |
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acd5377
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Perhaps I should not tell him the dream. It puts me in his hands, it is giving him too much,
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Anaïs Nin |
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670f19e
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The inner hatreds of men are now projected outside. There are fights in the streets. Revolutions in France, they say. Men did not seek to resolve their own personal revolutions, so now they act them out collectively.
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Anaïs Nin |
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e184a09
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The love of only one man or one woman is an enclosure.
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Anaïs Nin |
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39a1f3c
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I would not be concerned with the secrets, the lies, the mysteries, the facts. I would be concerned with what makes them necessary. What fear.
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Anaïs Nin |
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d798e02
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I said, "If there is an explanation of the mystery, it is this: the love between women is a refuge and an escape into harmony and narcissism in place of conflict."
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Anaïs Nin |
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752c717
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We're journeying constantly, but there is always a machine and books, and your body is always close to me and the look in your eyes never changes. People are saying we will be miserable, we will regret, but we are happy, we are laughing always, we are singing. We are talking Spanish and French and
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Anaïs Nin |
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573f0ca
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Hell is a different place for each man, or each man has his own particular hell. My descent into the inferno is a descent into the irrational level of existence, where the instincts and blind emotions are loose, where one lives by pure impulse, pure fantasy, and therefore pure madness. No, that is not the inferno.
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Anaïs Nin |
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cfe2e69
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I am more interested in human beings than in writing, more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living than in writing. More interested in becoming a work of art than in creating one.
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Anaïs Nin |
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7468bb0
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But what a superb game the three of us are playing. Who is the demon? Who is the liar? Who the human being? Who the cleverest? Who the strongest? Who loves the most? Are we three immense egos fighting for domination or for love, or are these things mixed?
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Anaïs Nin |
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b76576f
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Does she know I feel immobile and fixed, lost in her?
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Anaïs Nin |
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c23a36d
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You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensificatio..
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Anaïs Nin |
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61f851e
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The humiliations and defeats, given with a primitive honesty, end not in frustration, despair or futility,
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Anaïs Nin |
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ccc498f
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and the very folds of the curtains contained secrets and sighs.
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Anaïs Nin |
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ea28e87
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Our talks are wonderful, interplays, not duels but swift illuminations of one another. I can make his tentative thoughts click. He enlarges mine. I fire him. He makes me flow. There is always movement between us. And he is grasping. He takes hold of me like a prey.
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Anaïs Nin |
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44baef5
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I know that I go through life like a drunkard. I'm drunk on illusion. But no matter how drunk I am, there are things I can't help seeing, ferociously real things. I close my eyes, and I reel, I reel. I reel, I believe, I live in a fever and turmoil, I rise into ecstasy, but all the time there is the face of reality staring at me with ugly eyes. I know that if I open my eyes I will be intolerably hurt by the ugliness.
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Anaïs Nin |
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2b198ba
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She was now afraid to yield to passion, and because she could not yield to the larger impulses it became essential also to not yield to the small ones, even if her adversary were in the right. She was living on a plane of war. The bigger resistance to the flow of life became one with the smaller resistance to the will of others, and the smallest issue became equal to the ultimate one. The pleasure of yielding on a level of passion being unk..
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Anaïs Nin |
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2a0e785
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A writer, who was a celebrity in Paris, had entered her shop one day. He was not looking for a hat. He asked if she sold luminous flowers that he had heard about, flowers which shone in the dark. He wanted them, he said, for a woman who shone in the dark. He could swear that when he took her to the theatre and she sat back in the dark loges in her evening dress, her skin was as luminous as the finest of sea shells, with a pale pink glow to ..
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delta-of-venus
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Anaïs Nin |
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caac154
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I am caught. And he? What does he feel? I am invaded, I lose everything, my mind vacillates, I am only aware of sensation.
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Anaïs Nin |
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c7c77e4
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I always run away from the simplest phrases because they never contain all of the truth. To me the truth is something which cannot be told in a few words, and those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.
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writing
truth
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Anaïs Nin |
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f977d54
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As June walked toward me from the darkness of the garden into the light of the door, I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. Astartling white face, burning dark eyes, a face so alive I felt it would consume itself before my eyes. Years ago I tried to imagine a true beauty; I created in my mind an image of just such a woman. I had never seen her until last night. Yet I knew long ago the phosphorescent color of her skin, h..
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love
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Anaïs Nin |
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71da8d8
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It was this that frightened me--the sense that behind the lay concealed a little bourgeoise who wanted security in love.
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love
sexuality
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Anaïs Nin |
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7026ce6
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The physical as a symbol of the spiritual world. The people who keep old rags, old useless objects, who hoard, accumulate: are they also keepers and hoarders of old ideas, useless information, lovers of the past only, even in its form of detritus?...I have the opposite obsession. In order 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 obje..
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Anaïs Nin |
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adf3dbc
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Se vive asi, cobijado en un mundo delicado, y uno cree que vive. Entonces lee un libro (Lady Chatterley, por ejemplo), o va de viaje, o habla con Richard, y descubre que no vive, que esta simplemente hibernando. Los sintomas de la hibernacion se pueden detectar facilmente. El primero es la inquietud. El segundo sintoma (que llega cuando el estado de hibernacion empieza a ser peligroso y podria degenerar en muerte) es la ausencia de placer. ..
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Anaïs Nin |
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6b3e0cf
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Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one...
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perfection
life
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Anaïs Nin |
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e27f7ac
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We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing aggression in human beings. And when one sees in psychoanalysis hostility disappearing as people conquer their fears, one wonders if the cure is not there.
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war
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Anaïs Nin |
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0cb0579
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Man is always trying to create a woman who will fill his needs, and that makes her untrue to herself.
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Anaïs Nin |
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8ecd98a
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lHy@ l`tydy@ l trwq ly, nny 'twq l~ llHZt lkhrq@ km lswrylyyn fy nshdnhm lGrb@.
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Anaïs Nin |
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4ddec23
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human beings place upon an object, or a person, this responsibility of being the obstacle when the obstacle lies always within one's self.
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Anaïs Nin |
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16e6dc9
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We may seem to forget a person, a place, a state of being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is selecting new actors, seeking the closest reproduction to the friend, the lover, the husband we are trying to forget, in order to re-enact the drama with understudies. And one day we open our eyes and there we are, repeating the same story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is internal. It is what the old m..
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Anaïs Nin |
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652bdaf
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The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatmen..
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Anaïs Nin |
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4da9b5e
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By the end of the evening I was like a man, terribly in love with her face and body, which promised so much, and I hated the self created in her by others. Others feel because of her; and because of her, others write poetry; because of her, others hate; others, like Henry, love her in spite of themselves.
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passion
love
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Anaïs Nin |
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83dc6ea
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I see ashes under the skin of her face. Disintegration. What terrible anxiety I feel. I want to put my arms around her. I feel her receding into death and I am willing to enter death to follow her, to embrace her. She is dying before my eyes. Her tantalizing, somber beauty is dying. Her strange, manlike strength.
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Anaïs Nin |
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0d333ab
|
Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body's breath, and the strings' wails and moans are echoes of the body's music. It is the body's vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.
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music
life
jazz
vibrations
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Anaïs Nin |
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4875f1b
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This is not to worry you, Henry, it is just that I can't keep from saying it, that I am overflowing, desperately in love with you as I never was with anyone.
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Anaïs Nin |