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d6312a3
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The old concept of chronological, orderly, symmetrical development of character died when it was discovered that the unconscious motivations are entirely at odds with fabricated conventions. Human beings do not grow in perfect symmetry. They oscillate, expand, contract, backtrack, arrest themselves, retrogress, mobilize, atrophy in part, proceed erratically according to experience and traumas. Some aspects of the personality mature, others ..
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Anaïs Nin |
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de3b1dc
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I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.
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Anaïs Nin |
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a1ae264
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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. Such a separation may seem childish, but it is possible. Subtract the overintensity, the sizzling of ideas, and you get a woman who loves perfection. And faithfulness is one of the perfections. It seems stupid and unintelligent to..
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Anaïs Nin |
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2fcb4fa
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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.
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sex
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Anaïs Nin |
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d0226df
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It is right that you should read according to your temperament, occupations, hobbies, and vocations. But it is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar, unwilling to explore the unfamiliar. In science, we respect the research worker. In literature, we should not always read the books blessed by the majority.
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literature
unfamiliar
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Anaïs Nin |
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816602c
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Over and over again I sail towards joy, which is never in the room with me, but always near me, across the way, like those rooms full of gayety one sees from the street, or the gayety in the street one sees from a window. Will I ever reach joy? It hides behind the turning merry-go-round of the traveling circus. As soon as I approach it, it is no longer joy. Joy is a foam, an illumination. I am poorer and hungrier for the want of it. When I ..
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Anaïs Nin |
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861ddf5
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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. What was she seeking to salvage..
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solitude
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Anaïs Nin |
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82a90a4
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Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.
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books
book-quotes
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Anaïs Nin |
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d090603
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Fall, 1951] To me Acapulco is the detoxicating cure for all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep. It has somet..
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Anaïs Nin |
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0f926bf
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Around her hair there was a saffron aureole, and her skin was a sea shell...
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Anaïs Nin |
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594b7fb
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Love the great narcotic was the revealer in the alchemist's bottle rendering visible the most untraceable substances. Love the great narcotic was the agent provocateur exposing all the secret selves to daylight.
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books
book-quotes
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Anaïs Nin |
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4f620cf
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He never treated her as a wife. He wooed her over and over again, with presents, flowers, new pleasures.
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romance
french-eroticism
woo
pleasure
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Anaïs Nin |
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e1691e0
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I was sure the old man knew nothing about the beatitudes, ecstasies, dazzling reverberations of sexual encounters. Cut out the poetry was his message. Clinical sex, deprived of all the warmth of love--the orchestration of all the senses, touch, hearing, sight, palate; all the euphoric accompaniments, back-ground music, moods, atmosphere, variations--forced him to resort to literary aphrodisiacs.
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delta-of-venus
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Anaïs Nin |
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3c58538
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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.
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sex
erotica
sexuality
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Anaïs Nin |
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fc1f386
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We are punctual, a stressed, marked characteristic. We need order around us, in the house, in the life, although we live by irresistible impulses, as if the order in the closets, in our papers, in our books, in our photographs, in our souvenirs, in our clothes could preserve us from chaos in our feelings, loves, in our work. Indifference to food, sobriety; but this, we admit, is the part of the war against a threatening fragility.
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war
impulse
personality-traits
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Anaïs Nin |
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b6e0003
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And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity...
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books
book-quotes
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Anaïs Nin |
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d0cb7f9
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I don't want you to taint that fragile coat of astonishing colors created by my illusions, which no painter has ever been able to reproduce. Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions give them?
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Anaïs Nin |
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093c4ac
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In each studio there is a human being dressed in the full regalia of his myth fearing to expore a vulnerable opening, spreading not his charms but his defences, plotting to disrobe, somewhere along the night-- his body without the aperture of the heart or his heart with a door closed to his body. thus keeping one compartment for refuge, one uninvaded cell.
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Anaïs Nin |
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79a2138
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The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence.
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books
book-quotes
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Anaïs Nin |
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e82218b
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When we walked together through the streets, bodies close together, arm in arm, hands locked, I could not talk. We were walking over the world, over reality, into ecstasy. When she smelled my handkerchief, she inhaled me. When I clothed her beauty, I possessed her.
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Anaïs Nin |
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c745fa7
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I have created myself a soul, big as the world, that leaks all over, and I have to keep calling for the plumber.
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Anaïs Nin |
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a870820
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When you're in my arms, I know you're mine. But your feet are so swift, so swift, they carry you as lightly as wings, I never know where, too fast, too fast away from me.
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books
book-quotes
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Anaïs Nin |
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49deef9
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says he is afraid of me because I am the kind of woman who leaves scars.
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Anaïs Nin |
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729495f
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Didn't the old man know how words carry colors and sounds into the flesh
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Anaïs Nin |
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7f5a3f8
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The magic beauty of simultaneity, to see the loved one rushing toward you at the same moment you are rushing toward him, the magic power of meeting, exactly at midnight to achieve union, the illusion of one common rhythm achieved by overcoming obstacles, deserting friends, breaking other bonds - all this was soon dissolved by his laziness, by his habit of missing every moment, of never keeping his word, of living perversely in a state of ch..
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books
book-quotes
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Anaïs Nin |
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87cd34a
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you are a narcissist. That is the raison detre of the journal. Journal writing is a disease. But it's all right. It's very interesting. I don't know of any journal more interesting. I don't know of any woman writing so frankly.
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Anaïs Nin |
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e5b9e6d
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I will cover the walls with words. It will be la chambre des mots.
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Anaïs Nin |
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a32de14
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When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He's a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me.
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Anaïs Nin |
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f043262
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Like the Baron, Mathilde developed a formula for acting out life as a series of roles--that is, by saying to herself in the morning while brushing her blond hair, "Today I want to become this or that person," and then proceeding to be that person. One day she decided she would like to be an elegant representative of a well-known Parisian modiste and go to Peru. All she had to do was to act the role. So she dressed with care, presented herse..
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delta-of-venus
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Anaïs Nin |
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ff09f20
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I am losing my great, dissolving, disintegrating pity for others, in which I saw deflected the compassion I wanted for myself. I no longer give compassion, which means I no longer need to receive it.
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Anaïs Nin |
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31af982
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It is hard for me to believe in continuous, sustained happiness, just as it is hard for me to believe in love.
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Anaïs Nin |
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661623e
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No one was ever born without that light or flame of life. Some event, some person stifles or drowns it altogether. I was always tempted to resuscitate such men by my own joyousness or luminosity. When I break glasses in a night club, as the Russians do, when my unconscious breaks out in wild rebellions, it is against life which has crippled these idealistic, romantic men. I respect these men, cold, pure, faithful, devoted, moral, delicate, ..
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joy
life
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Anaïs Nin |
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69d2381
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At sixteen Sabina took moon baths, first of all because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous. The effect of moon baths was unknown, but it was intimated that it might be the opposite of the sun's effect. The first time she exposed herself she was frightened. What would the consequences be?
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Anaïs Nin |
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8953cf2
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When life becomes too difficult, I turn to my work. I swim into a new region.
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Anaïs Nin |
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08dd122
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Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become a 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 - to Henry's selfishness, June's love of power, my insatiable creativity which must concern itself with other and cannot be sufficient to itself. I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately..
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Anaïs Nin |
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1b2f626
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In this instant of danger they realized they were each other's reason for living, and into this instant they threw their whole being.
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books
book-quotes
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Anaïs Nin |
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7984e7f
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They walked in silence through the little streets of Chinatown. Women from all over the world smiled at them from open windows, stood on the doorsteps inviting them in. Some of the rooms were exposed to the street. Only a curtain concealed the beds. One could see couples embracing. There were Syrian women wearing their native costume, Arabian women with jewelry covering their half-naked bodies, Japanese and Chinese women beckoning slyly, bi..
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delta-of-venus
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Anaïs Nin |
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59856d3
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His room was like an explorer's den, a lair of furs, the cave of a magician.
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Anaïs Nin |
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adc114c
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He worked on small canvases with a touch as light as a cobweb and coloring made of mirages. He lived there, at the bottom of the sea...
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Anaïs Nin |
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2667fc3
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I suffered from other kinds of pangs. I was prone to the most excessive dreaming, of such intensity and realism that when I awakened I felt I lost an entire universe of legends, myths, figures and cities of such color that they made our room seem a thousand times more bare, the poverty of the table more acute.
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Anaïs Nin |
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a03b3b7
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I never lose sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled.
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vision
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Anaïs Nin |
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8cf34c9
|
So many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost object, a misplaced unread book, cluttering the room like an attic with discarded possessions.
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books
book-quotes
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Anaïs Nin |
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ee85727
|
Hugo and I yield entirely to each other. We cannot be without each other, we cannot endure discord, war, estrangement, we cannot take walks alone, we do not like to travel without each other. We have yielded in spite of our individualism, our hatred of intimacy. We have absorbed our egocentric selves into our love. Our love is our ego.
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Anaïs Nin |
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196ed83
|
When human pain has struck me fiercely, when anger has corroded me, I rise, I always rise after the crucifixion, and I am in terror of my ascensions. THE FISSURE IN REALITY. The divine departure. I fall. I fall into darkness after the collusion with pain, and after pain the divine departure.
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Anaïs Nin |