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To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school [of writing]. A hunger for the unknown and an aspiration toward beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial.

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
Beauty
Aspiration
Word
Artificial
Art
Realistic
Reality
Unknown
Frauds
School
Hunger
Distorted
America
Toward
Inseparable
Mean
Civilization
Ugliness
Writing
Mistake
Fraud

More quotes by Anais Nin

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I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.
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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.
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The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.
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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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Great repressions create dualities.
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Good things happen to those who hustle.
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The love of only one man or one woman is an enclosure.
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I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go.
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Things aren't the way they are, they're the way you are
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I can’t let you go now. I want to go places with you obscure little places, just to be able to say: here I came with her.
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We don't see things as they are, we see them as we ... believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
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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.
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Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you.
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We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in modern life. That is our tragedy. Once I wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only absolute act left to do, for what is most powerful in me is the craving for purity, greatness.
Anais Nin
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I am quite wiling to confide entirely in human being, except that at some moment or another human beings get preoccupied, moody, busy, inattentive, and there come an end to the interest, and this never happens in a journal!
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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I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.
Anais Nin
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The inner chambers of the soul are like the photographer's darkroom. Like a laboratory. One cannot stay there all the time or it becomes the solitary cell of the neurotic.
Anais Nin
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Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an artist.
Anais Nin
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Perfection is static, And I am in full progress.
Anais Nin