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When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

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
Illusion
Bears
Asked
Others
Truth
Ethics
Wanted
Bear
Live
Honesty
Convinced

More quotes by Anais Nin

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What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.
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Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.
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Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.
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When I stand at the top of the Champs-Elysées, with its chestnut trees in flower, its undulations of shining cars, its white spaciousness, I feel as if I were biting into a utopian fruit, something velvety and lustrous and rich and vivid.
Anais Nin
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For all of my patients sensuality is a giving in to 'the low side of their nature.' Puritanism is powerful and distorts their life with a total anesthesia of the senses. If you atrophy one sense, you also atrophy all the others, a sensuous and physical connection with nature, with art, with food, with other human beings.
Anais Nin
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Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home.
Anais Nin
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jazz is the expression of America's romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force.
Anais Nin
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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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Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.
Anais Nin
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I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits
Anais Nin
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You are the only woman who ever answered the demands of my imagination.
Anais Nin
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For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated.
Anais Nin
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atrophy of feeling creates criminals.
Anais Nin
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Everything but happiness is neurosis.
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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There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.
Anais Nin
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Is devotion to others a cover for the hungers and the needs of the self, of which one is ashamed? I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not virtue. It was a disguise.
Anais Nin
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In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action.
Anais Nin
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Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky
Anais Nin
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Through love, through friendship, a heart lives more than one life.
Anais Nin