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When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.

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
Call
Necessity
Write
Breathing
Feel
Prison
Feels
Sea
Needs
Color
Writing
Lose
World
Loses
Heave
Fire
Shrinking

More quotes by Anais Nin

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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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the best way to remember a beautiful city or a beautiful painting is to eat something while you are looking at it. The flavor really helps the image to penetrate the body. It fixes it as lacquer does a drawing.
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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.
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For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue — that I had to do the job myself.
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No one should be forced to carry the unfulfilled self of another.
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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.
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There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.
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[On Paris:] A city never entirely known, yet which gives you the feeling of intimacy, of possessing it intimately.
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The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have...excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.
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When I stand at the top of the Champs-Elysées, with its chestnut trees in flower, its undulations of shining cars, its white spaciousness, I feel as if I were biting into a utopian fruit, something velvety and lustrous and rich and vivid.
Anais Nin
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All unlived emotions turn to inanity.
Anais Nin
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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.
Anais Nin
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I have this weird obsession about buying books and looking at them with a smile, even if I won't read them soon. At least they are mine now.
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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.
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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Solitude may rust your words.
Anais Nin
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We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.
Anais Nin
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The one who travels like a lover searching for a new passion is suddenly blessed with new eyes, new ears, new senses.
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For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated.
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atrophy of feeling creates criminals.
Anais Nin