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

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Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.
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I must know, he thinks. It must be clear to me. There is a world which is closed to him, a world of shadings, gradations, nuances, and subtleties. He is a genius and yet he is too explicit. June slips between his fingers. You cannot posses without loving.
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The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
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Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.
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We cannot cure the evils of politics with politics.
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When I don't write, I feel my world shrink. I lose my fire, my color.
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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.
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The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.
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To love and to labor is the sum of living.
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The child who is uprooted begins to recognize that what he builds within himself is what will endure, what will withstand shattering experiences.
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I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason.
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Each friend represents a world in us.
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Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.
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We must protect the minority writers because they are the research workers of literature. They keep it alive. It has been fashionable of late to seek out and force such writers into more popular channels, to the detriment of both writer and an unprepared public.
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Jazz is the music of the body.
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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.
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willingness to explore everything is a sign of strength. The weak ones have prejudices. Prejudices are a protection.
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I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.
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My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.
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I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived.
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