Anais Nin Quotes
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It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
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How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.
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It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.
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I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
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There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
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Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
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There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
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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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Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
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We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
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The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
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If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
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When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
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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.
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A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.
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Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
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When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
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Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
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The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
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My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.