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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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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
Take
Cover
Needs
Devotion
Always
Ashamed
Hunger
Gave
Virtue
Others
Hungers
Self
Disguise

More quotes by Anais Nin

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It is in the movements of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately.
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I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood.
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I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
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This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men's dreams.
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We are all engaged in the task of peeling off the false selves, the programmed selves, the selves created by our families, our culture, our religions. It is an enormous task because the history of women has been as incompletely told as the history of blacks.
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Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate. I hate murderously.
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We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations.
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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.
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Guilt is the one burden human beings can't bear alone.
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To change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard
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I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again. ANAÏS NIN, Fire: From A Journal of Love The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1938 For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration.
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
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Coming near him like a ballet dancer she took a leap towards him, and he, frightened by her vehemence, and fearing that she would crash against him, instinctively became absolutely rigid, and she felt herself embracing a statue.
Anais Nin
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I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
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.
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Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.
Anais Nin
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Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.
Anais Nin
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The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.
Anais Nin
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I want to make my own discoveries…….penetrate the evil which attracts me
Anais Nin
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Self-destructive patterns cause as much suffering as outer catastrophes.
Anais Nin