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If you can't create, you destroy.

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
Destroy
Destruction
Creativity
Create

More quotes by Anais Nin

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I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.
Anais Nin
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There are only two kinds of freedom in the world the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.
Anais Nin
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I have seen romanticism outlast the realistic. I have seen men forget the beautiful women they have possessed, forget the prostitutes, and remember the first woman they idolized, the woman they could never have. The woman who aroused them romantically holds them.
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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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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The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted.
Anais Nin
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Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.
Anais Nin
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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.
Anais Nin
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With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness... something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame, annihilate him, with a pleasure never known before.
Anais Nin
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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.
Anais Nin
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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.
Anais Nin
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The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world.
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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The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.
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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We are cruel when someone refuses to play the role in which we have cast him. We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us.
Anais Nin
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We see things the way we are, not the way they are.
Anais Nin
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Ordinary life does not interest me.
Anais Nin
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I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.
Anais Nin
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I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated
Anais Nin