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aea0d77
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There are women's voices that sound like poetic, unearthly echoes. Then they change. The eyes change. I believe that all these legends about people changing into animals at night - like the stories of the werewolf, for instance - were invented by men who saw women transformed at night - from idealized, worshipful creatures into animals and thought that they were possessed.
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wild
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Anaïs Nin |
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251d5bd
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Yes, it is you, and I am in love with you and I am going to be frank with you, brutally frank, because when you have an equal you can afford to be frank.
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Anaïs Nin |
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0a76f30
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Lillian was reminded of the Talmudic words: "We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are."
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Anaïs Nin |
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aaacaf3
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If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other, if only I could save you all from yourselves, said the modern Christ. But none of us could bear to pass through the tunnel which led from the house into the world on the other side of the walls, where there were leaves on the trees, where water ran beside the paths, where there was daylight and joy. We could not believe that the tunnel would op..
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Anaïs Nin |
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7d45e39
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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.
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woman
reality
metamorphosis
painful
wept
growth
innocence
transformation
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Anaïs Nin |
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083b2d5
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And now I lost my last treasure: the dreaming. For nothing in the dreams took the place of the human warmth I had witnessed. Now I felt utterly poor, because I could not create a human companion. This hunger which had inhabited her entire being, which had thinned her blood, transpired through her bones, attacked the roots of her hair, given a fragility to her skin which was never to disappear entirely, had been so enormous that it had marke..
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Anaïs Nin |
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e5e0073
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You know, Lillian, someday I will sit down and write a little dictionary for you, a little Chinese dictionary. In it I will put down all the interpretations of what is said to you, the right interpretation, that is: the one that is not meant to injure, not meant to humiliate or accuse or doubt. And whenever something is said to you, you will look in my little dictionary to make sure, before you get desperate, that you have understood what i..
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Anaïs Nin |
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fccd34f
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I was growing sad, sad with restlessness and hunger. I felt that nothing would happen to me. I felt desperate with desire to be a woman, to plunge into living. Why was I enslaved by this need of being in love first? Where would my life begin? It seemed to me that a great current was passing all around me and that I was left out. I would have to find someone who felt as I did. But where? Where?
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Anaïs Nin |
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6b062df
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Perhaps," said the Doctor pensively. "It may also be that you Americans are work-cultists, and work is the structure that holds you up, not the joy of pure living."
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Anaïs Nin |
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4c8aa1a
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He was only for the joyous days, the days of courage, when she could share with him all the good things he brought with his passion for novelty and change. But he knew nothing of her; he was no companion to her sadness. He could never imagine anyone else's mood, only his own. His own were so immense and loud, they filled his world and deafened him to all others. He was not concerned to know whether she could live or breathe within the dark ..
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Anaïs Nin |
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034743e
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Lillian did not know then that the one who believes he can pay this early debt meets a bottomless well. Because the first denial has set off a fatality of revenge which no amount of giving can placate.
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Anaïs Nin |
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30a7fd1
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I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life.
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words
literature
reading
writing
language
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Anaïs Nin |
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97c1de2
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When I am happy it is so rare. I need to dwell on it, to contemplate it. What a hunger, a craving for beautiful things.
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Anaïs Nin |
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0a8f727
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The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment.
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books
book-quotes
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Anaïs Nin |
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643892f
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But love, the great narcotic, was the hothouse in which all the selves burst into their fullest bloom...
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books
book-quotes
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Anaïs Nin |
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7230a4b
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She was truthful, or I was the greatest dupe who ever existed. I can only believe in our ecstasy. I don't want to know, I only want to love her.
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love
truth
truthful
ecstasy
love-is-blind
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Anaïs Nin |
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51b7ba8
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She was sewing together the little proofs of his devotion out of which to make a garment for her tattered love and faith. He cut into the faith with negligent scissors, and she mended and sewed and rewove and patched. He wasted, and threw away, and could not evaluate or preserve, or contain, or keep his treasures. Like his ever torn pockets, everything slipped through and was lost, as he lost gifts, mementos--all the objects from the past. ..
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relationships
love
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Anaïs Nin |
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79018c6
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What you call your lies are fiction and myths. The art of creating a disguise can be as beautiful as the creation of a painting... I created a woman for my artist life, bold, gay, courageous, generous, fearless; and another to please my father, a clear-sighted woman with a love of beauty, harmony, and self-discipline, critical and selective; and still another who lives in chaos, embraces the weak and the stumbling and the confused.
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personal-mythmaking
disguise
chaos
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Anaïs Nin |
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35af85c
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Am I creating my own isolation? It seems to me that most of my acts are acts of integrity. So much takes place within me each day that by comparison I find a paucity, a stinginess, a silence in people which drives me to excess.
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loneliness
isolation
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Anaïs Nin |
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b627753
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When I saw you, Sabina, I chose my body.
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sexuality
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Anaïs Nin |
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0c1ab86
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You had to account for every move, arrival or exit. In the world there was a conspiracy against improvisation. It was only permitted in jazz.
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Anaïs Nin |
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f140e28
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For the first time, in Golconda, she had practiced Larry's choice of withdrawing if the people were not of quality. Of preferring solitude to the effort of pretending he was interested in them.
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Anaïs Nin |
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678855e
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Will I really be able to accept my mental loneliness?
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Anaïs Nin |
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6169b96
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You cannot do any more for me," I said. "Since I have begun to depend on you I feel weaker than ever before. I have disappointed you by acting neurotically at the very moment when I should have shown the wisdom of your guidance. I don't want to ever come back to you. I feel that I must go and work and live and forget about all this."
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therapy
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Anaïs Nin |
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7180d73
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He observed confusion and chaos, which I call living by one's emotions instead of one's mind.
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Anaïs Nin |
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d36e8de
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I am happy today. I am a tyrant.
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Anaïs Nin |
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af8c7d3
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To capture the drama of the unconscious, one had to start with the key, and the key was the dream. But the novelist's task was to pursue this dream, to unravel its meaning; the goal was to reach the relation of dream to life; the suspense was in finding this which led to a deeper significance of our acts.
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writing
dreams
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Anaïs Nin |
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15248a5
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You make me think of Casanova, except that in between the erotic, Casanova was boring, while you, in between eroticism and even because of it, you get profound.
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Anaïs Nin |
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496a770
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It was as if in captivity, her brilliant plumage were losing its brilliance. She felt the metamorphosis. She knew she was moulting.
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Anaïs Nin |
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ed56e48
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The words we did not shout, the tears unshed, the curse we swallowed, the phrase we shortened, the love we killed, turned into magnetic iron ore, into tourmaline, into pyrite agate, blood congealed into cinnabar, blood calcinated, leadened into galena, oxidized, aluminized, sulphated, calcinated, the mineral glow of dead meteors and exhausted suns in the forest of dead trees and dead desires.
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Anaïs Nin |
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0c83c78
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We can build a palace around us if everything is right between us.
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Anaïs Nin |
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6b3cc4e
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'n dmy@ shdth 'Sb` Gyr mdrb@ , muzqt wnuz`t mny dhr`y bqsw@ , dhr` myt@ , wl'khr~ tktb bHms mfrT wsT lfrG
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Anaïs Nin |
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208d63e
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What makes some butterflies have such beautiful colors on their wings, and others not?" "The plain ones were born of parents who didn't know how to paint."
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Anaïs Nin |
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c467650
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kln mthkhnwn blshrwkh wlzdwjt wltnqDt
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Anaïs Nin |
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6fb9e53
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Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. But I am more preoccupied with loving.
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loving
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Anaïs Nin |
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e7938ae
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She could do nothing. Djuna's words illuminated her chaos, but changed nothing. What was it Djuna said: that life tended to crystallize into patterns which became traps and webs. That people tended to see each other in their first "state" or "form" and to adopt a rhythm in consequence. That they had greatest difficulty in seeing the transformations of the loved one, in seeing the becoming. If they did finally perceive the new self, they had..
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Anaïs Nin |
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0527166
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Do you have regrets that we were so overwhelmed? Do you ever wish to live those hours over again and differently, with more confidence.
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Anaïs Nin |
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679cca2
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I love you, June, and you know how acutely, how desperately. You know that no one can say or do anything to shake my love. I have taken you into myself, whole. You need have no fear of being unmasked, only loved.
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unconditional-love
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Anaïs Nin |
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df5c429
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He was whispering over and over again the same phrase, "You have the body of an angel. It is impossible that such a body should have a sex. You have the body of an angel." The anger swept over Fay like a fever, an anger at his moving his penis away from her hand. She sat up, her hair wild about her shoulders, and said, "I am not an angel, Albert. I am a woman. I want you to love me as a woman."
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Anaïs Nin |
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db59fb2
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am discovering her pretenses. She is always smiling, gay, but underneath she feels unreal, remote, detached from experience. She acts as if she were asleep. She is trying to awaken by falling into bed with anyone who invites her.
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Anaïs Nin |
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ac92187
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She needed a confessor! Would she find it there, in the world of the artists? All over the world they had their meeting places, their affiliations, their rules of membership, their kingdoms, their chiefs, their secret channels of communication. They established common beliefs in certain painters, certain musicians, certain writers. They were the misplaced persons too, unwanted at home usually, or repudiated by their families. But they estab..
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Anaïs Nin |
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b15eb02
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No rest for me anywhere. No rest from writing, awareness, insights, memories, fantasies, analogies, free associations. Writing becomes imperative for a surcharged head.
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Anaïs Nin |
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fb25cd5
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Hugo has been infinitely tender with me, but while he talks of June I think of our hands locked together. She does not reach the same sexual center of my being that man reaches; she does not touch that. What, then, has she moved in me? I have wanted to possess her as if I were a man, but I have also wanted her to love me with the eyes, the hands, the senses that only women have. It is a soft and subtle penetration.
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Anaïs Nin |
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9f0f6fe
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Why does a gesture, a walk, stir your blood? What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no drug and no alcohol to equal it.
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Anaïs Nin |