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Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death

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
Imagination
Freedom
Death
Body
Idealism
Utter

More quotes by Anais Nin

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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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Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a wordly way.
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 an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason.
Anais Nin
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I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.
Anais Nin
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It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.
Anais Nin
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He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.
Anais Nin
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The bed must be a beautiful place, not only because you make love there but because you dream there as well.
Anais Nin
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the cynic is a coward. He foresees all barrenness so that barrenness can never surprise him.
Anais Nin
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[in the]..curious way that my idealism has been mixed with my fatalism, so that I can possess the soul of a dreamer and that of a cynic at the same time......I possess a power of magic...[to] destroy the balance of a well-designed destiny with my diabolical mind.
Anais Nin
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Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks it.
Anais Nin
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My trunk, valises and my mind are overpacked.
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 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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I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly.
Anais Nin
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The two men who have done the greatest harm to the world are Christ and Columbus. Christ taught us guilt and sacrifice, to live only in the other world, and Columbus discovered America and materialism.
Anais Nin
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When I hear of people who weary of each other, I believe it is because they have sought virtues in themselves alone, attractions of physical beauty. Have they based their love on each other's thoughts? Who can weary of thoughts which change every day?
Anais Nin
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When one is pretending the entire body revolts.
Anais Nin
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But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted.
Anais Nin
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The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
Anais Nin