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I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived.

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
Needed
Also
Live
Writing
Record
Lived
Records

More quotes by Anais Nin

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If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.
Anais Nin
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I don't hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you into me. I could stuff my ears and it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.
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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At first she beckoned and lured one into her world then, she blurred the passageways, confused all the images, as if to elude detection.
Anais Nin
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When you possess light within, you see it externally.
Anais Nin
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I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream.
Anais Nin
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The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.
Anais Nin
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Poetry, which is our relation to the senses, enables us to retain a living relationship to all things. It is the quickest means of transportation to reach dimensions above or beyond the traps set by the so-called realists. It is a way to learn levitation and travel in liberated continents, to travel by moonlight as well as sunlight.
Anais Nin
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Balance is not to be sought by association with others it must exist within one's self.
Anais Nin
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It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin
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But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted.
Anais Nin
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We love best those who are, or act for us, a self we do not wish to be or act out.
Anais Nin
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Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.
Anais Nin
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At a lecture I am asked to pronounce my name three times. I try to be slow and emphatic, Anaïs - Anaïs - Anaïs. You just say Anna and then add ees, with the accent on the ees.
Anais Nin
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In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.
Anais Nin
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A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.
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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Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their mysteries and secrets, they act and pretend. I like the character of men better.
Anais Nin
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I love man as creator, lover, husband, friend, but man the father I do not trust. I do not believe in man as father. I do not trust man as father.
Anais Nin
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I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman
Anais Nin