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To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.

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
Lying
Engender
Insanity
Courses
Course

More quotes by 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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Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments.
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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The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.
Anais Nin
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I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.
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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Sexual intercourse... a joyous, joyous, joyous, joyous impaling of woman on man's sensual mast.
Anais Nin
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The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.
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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When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
Anais Nin
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When you possess light within, you see it externally.
Anais Nin
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Acapulco in the sunset seems like a balm it enters the blood like a drug after one inhalation of the scent of flowers, one glimpse of the bay iridescent like silk, the sunset like the inside of a shell, so much like the flesh of Venus.
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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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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Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of himself that he does not see himself in the mirror.
Anais Nin
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Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
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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You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.
Anais Nin
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Death from disillusion is not instantaneous, and there are no mercy killers for the disillusioned.
Anais Nin
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notes fly so much farther than words. There is no other way to reach the infinite.
Anais Nin