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To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you.

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
Dies
Living
Give
Giving
Life
Nourishes
Withhold

More quotes by Anais Nin

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That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe.
Anais Nin
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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.
Anais Nin
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The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.
Anais Nin
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When I first met him, he did not care if a friend did not fit into his world, because at that time his world had not been born yet.
Anais Nin
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We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.
Anais Nin
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There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
Anais Nin
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You marry the day you realize the human defects of your love.
Anais Nin
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My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.
Anais Nin
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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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Mature people relate to each other without the need to merge.
Anais Nin
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I palliate the sufferings of others. yes I see myself as softening the blows, dissolving acids, neutralizing poisons, every moment of the day. I try to fulfill the wishes of others, to perform miracles. I exert myself performing miracles.
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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Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.
Anais Nin
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myself ... is merely an instrument to connect life and a myth
Anais Nin
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There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time.
Anais Nin
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If you can't create, you destroy.
Anais Nin
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In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.
Anais Nin
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The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.
Anais Nin
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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.
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