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

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Through love, through friendship, a heart lives more than one life.
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When you possess light within, you see it externally.
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You marry the day you realize the human defects of your love.
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I sleep with my feet on moss carpets, my branches in the cotton of the clouds.
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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.
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I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.
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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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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.
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Every individual is representative of the whole . . . and should be intimately understood, and this would give a far greater understanding of mass movements and sociology.
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I don't wish power, only art -art and passion.
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Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.
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Idealism is the death of the body and the imagination. All but freedom, utter freedom, is death
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Violence is a symptom of impotence.
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To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.
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Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key!
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I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.
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Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.
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We do not see the world as it is. We see the word as we are.
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People who want a sane, static, measurable world take the first aspect of an event or person and stick to it, with an almost self-protective obstinacy, or by a natural limitation of their imaginations. They do not indulge in either deepening or magnifying.
Anais Nin
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He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity.
Anais Nin