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Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

Anais Nin

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Anais Nin
Age: 73 †
Born: 1903
Born: February 21
Died: 1977
Died: January 14
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Neuilly
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell
Anais Nin
Born
Art
Balances
Great
Inhibitions
Something
Instability
Always
Excess
Loneliness
Terror
Balance

More quotes by Anais Nin

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I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self.
Anais Nin
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she acquired the certainty of the expansion of time by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity of experience.
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He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away.
Anais Nin
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I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
Anais Nin
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Descendants of pigeons once fed by Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin and many other famous lovers are still being fed, and the sudden sound when they all rise together, frightened away, is like the sound of giant sails flapping.
Anais Nin
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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.
Anais Nin
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Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it.
Anais Nin
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I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated
Anais Nin
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I cannot concentrate all my friendship on any single one of my friends because no one is complete enough in himself.
Anais Nin
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One always, sooner or later, comes upon a city which is an image of one's inner cities. Fez is an image of my inner self. ... The layers of the city of Fez are like the layers and secrecies of the inner life. One needs a guide. ... There were in Fez, as in my life, streets which led nowhere, impasses which remained a mystery.
Anais Nin
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I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ
Anais Nin
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I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it.
Anais Nin
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Warmth, perfume, rugs, soft lights, books. They do not appease me. I am aware of time passing, of all the world contains that I have not seen, of all the interesting people I have not met.
Anais Nin
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New York has an electronic heart.
Anais Nin
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Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others to be, not to seem.
Anais Nin
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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.
Anais Nin
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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.
Anais Nin
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I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.
Anais Nin
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Anxiety is loves greatest killer.
Anais Nin
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Not afraid of poverty and drabness and who is untouched by it, untouched by the drunkenness of her friends (she) who judges, selects, discards people with severity, who knows, when she is telling her endless anecdotes, that they are ways of escape, keeping herself all the more secret behind that profuse talk.
Anais Nin