Background Image

...

Talk—half-talk, Phrases That Had No Need To Be Finished, Abstractions, Chinese Bells Played On With Cotton-tipped Sticks, Mock Orange Blossoms Painted On Porcelain. The Muffled, Close, Half-talk Of Soft-fleshed Women. The Men She Had Embraced, And The Women, All Washing Against The Resonance Of My Memory. Sound Within Sound, Scene Within Scene, Woman Within Woman—like Acid Revealing An Invisible Script. One Woman Within Another Eternally, In A Far-reaching Procession, Shattering My Mind Into Fragments, Into Quarter Tones Which No Orchestral Baton Can Ever Make Whole Again.

-Anais Nin

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Talk—half-talk, Phrases That Had

Anais Nin

...

Talk—half-talk, Phrases That Had No Need To Be Finished, Abstractions, Chinese Bells Played On With Cotton-tipped Sticks, Mock Orange Blossoms Painted On Porcelain. The Muffled, Close, Half-talk Of Soft-fleshed Women. The Men She Had Embraced, And The Women, All Washing Against The Resonance Of My Memory. Sound Within Sound, Scene Within Scene, Woman Within Woman—like Acid Revealing An Invisible Script. One Woman Within Another Eternally, In A Far-reaching Procession, Shattering My Mind Into Fragments, Into Quarter Tones Which No Orchestral Baton Can Ever Make Whole Again.

Views: 88743

Topic

More From Anais Nin

All Those Who Try To Unveil The Mysteries Always Have Tragic Lives. At The End They Are Always Punished.

He Understands My Pity For His Ridiculous, Humiliating Physical Necessity.

I See Myself Wrapped In Lies, Which Do Not Seem To Penetrate My Soul, As If They Are Not Really A Part Of Me. They Are Like Costumes.

Dreams Pass Into The Reality Of Action. From The Actions Stems The Dream Again; And This Interdependence Produces The Highest Form Of Living.

Because History Is Only An Aggregate Of Personal Hostilities, Personal Prejudices, Personal Blindness And Irrationality, There Are Times When We Have To Live Against It.

America Hates The Artist. It Will Not Admit: The Artist Is My Soul And I Want To Kill Off My Soul.

The Diary Taught Me That It Is In The Moments Of Emotional Crisis That Human Beings Reveal Themselves Most Accurately. I Learned To Choose The Heightened Moments Because They Are The Moments Of Revelation.

I'm Awaiting A Lover. I Have To Be Rent And Pulled Apart And Live According To The Demons And The Imagination In Me. I'm Restless. Things Are Calling Me Away. My Hair Is Being Pulled By The Stars Again.

The Final Lesson A Writer Learns Is That Everything Can Nourish The Writer.

Sometimes I Think Of Paris Not As A City But As A Home.

Instead Of Answering Her As Soon As He Saw Her Hair Grow Electric, Her Face More Vivid, Her Eyes Like Lightning, Her Body Restless And Jerky Like A Racehorse’s, He Retired Behind This Wall Of Objective Understanding, This Gentle Testing And Acceptance Of Her, Just As One Watches An Animal In The Zoo And Smiles At His Antics, But Is Not Drawn Into This Mood. It Was This Which Left Lilith In A State Of Isolation - Indeed, Like A Wild Animal In An Absolute Desert.

I Gathered Poets Around Me And We All Wrote Beautiful Erotica. As We Were Condemned To Focus Only On Sensuality, We Had Violent Explosions Of Poetry. Writing Erotica Became A Road To Sainthood Rather Than To Debauchery.

The Role Of A Writer Is Not To Say What We All Can Say, But What We Are Unable To Say.

Inspirational Life

Balance Is Not To Be Sought By Association With Others; It Must Exist Within One's Self.

New York Has An Electronic Heart.

If You Can't Create, You Destroy.

I Seek The Real Stuff Of Life. Profound Drama.

Introspection Is A Devouring Monster. You Have To Feed It With Much Material, Much Experience, Many People, Many Places, Many Loves, Many Creations, And Then It Ceases Feeding On You.

Don't Let One Cloud Obliterate The Whole Sky.

Positive Thinking

A Man Fell In Love With Jeanne, And She Tried To Love Him. But She Complained That He Uttered Such Ordinary Words, That He Could Never Say The Magic Phrase Which Would Open Her Being.

Luxury Is Not A Necessity To Me, But Beautiful And Good Things Are.

I Looked At It [revolver] As If It Reminded Me Of A Crime I Had Committed With An Irrepressible Smile Such As Rises Sometimes To People’s Lips In The Face Of Great Catastrophes Which Are Beyond Their Grasp, The Smile That Comes At Times On Certain Women’s Faces While They Are Saying They Regret The Harm They Have Done. It Is The Smile Of Nature Quietly And Proudly Asserting Its Natural Right To Kill.

She Had Lost Herself Somewhere Along The Frontier Between Her Inventions, Her Stories, Her Fantasies And Her True Self. The Boundaries Had Become Effaced, The Tracks Lost, She Had Walked Into Pure Chaos, And Not A Chaos Which Carried Her Like The Galloping Of Romantic Riders In Operas And Legends, But Which Suddenly Revealed The Stage Props: A Papier-mâché Horse.

I Have So Strong A Sense Of Creation, Of Tomorrow, That I Cannot Get Drunk, Knowing I Will Be Less Alive, Less Well, Less Creative The Next Day.

I Don’t Really Want To Become Normal, Average, Standard. I Want Merely To Gain In Strength, In The Courage To Live Out My Life More Fully, Enjoy More, Experience More. I Want To Develop Even More Original And More Unconventional Traits

She Was Fully, Painfully Aware That Very Rarely Did Midnight Strike In Two Hearts At Once, Very Rarely Did Midnight Arouse Two Different Equal Desires, And That Any Dislocation In This, Any Indifference, Was An Indication Of Disunity, Of The Difficulties, The Impossibilities Of Fusion Between Two Human Beings.

For All Of My Patients Sensuality Is A Giving In To 'the Low Side Of Their Nature.' Puritanism Is Powerful And Distorts Their Life With A Total Anesthesia Of The Senses. If You Atrophy One Sense, You Also Atrophy All The Others, A Sensuous And Physical Connection With Nature, With Art, With Food, With Other Human Beings.

The Richest Source Of Creation Is Feeling, Followed By A Vision Of Its Meaning.

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.

Introspection Is A Devouring Monster.

Art Is The Method Of Levitation, In Order To Separate One's Self From Enslavement By The Earth.

Ordinary Life Does Not Interest Me. I Seek Only The High Moments. I Am In Accord With The Surrealists, Searching For The Marvelous.

I Take Pleasure In My Transformations. I Look Quiet And Consistent, But Few Know How Many Women There Are In Me.

To The Woman With The Least Intelligence, There Must Come, At Some Time Or Other, The Realization That Housework Is Animal Work And That There Are Other Occupations In The World A Thousand Times More Refined, More Enriching, For Which She Is Also Suited And To Which She Has A Right.

My Life Is Slowed Up By Thought And The Need To Understand What I Am Living.

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.

What We Call Our Destiny Is Truly Our Character And That Character Can Be Altered. The Knowledge That We Are Responsible For Our Actions And Attitudes Does Not Need To Be Discouraging, Because It Also Means That We Are Free To Change This Destiny. One Is Not In Bondage To The Past, Which Has Shaped Our Feelings, To Race, Inheritance, Background. All This Can Be Altered If We Have The Courage To Examine How It Formed Us. We Can Alter The Chemistry Provided We Have The Courage To Dissect The Elements.

And The Day Came When The Risk To Remain Tight In A Bud Was More Painful Than The Risk It Took To Blossom.

Adolescence Is Like Cactus.

I’m Restless. Things Are Calling Me Away. My Hair Is Being Pulled By The Stars Again.

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.

I See Enormous Loves Growing Immense And Finally Crushing Me.

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.

In New York The Acoustics Are Good For Laughter, For Life Is All External, All Action, No Thought, No Meditation, No Dreaming, No Reflection, Only The Exuberance Of Action.

Create A World, Your World. Alone. Stand Alone. And Then Love Will Come To You, Then It Comes To You.

When You Possess Light Within, You See It Externally.

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.

Societies In Decline Have No Use For Visionaries.

Too Late For Changes, Too Late Perhaps For Explanations And Ideological Webs, But The Love Goes On, The Love Goes On, Blind To Laws And Warnings And Even To Wisdom And To Fears. And Whatever That Love Is, Perhaps An Illusion Of A New Love, I Want It, I Cant Resist It, My Whole Being Melts In One Kiss, My Knowledge Melts, My Fears Melt, My Blood Dances, My Legs Open.

We Must Protect The Minority Writers Because They Are The Research Workers Of Literature. They Keep It Alive. It Has Been Fashionable Of Late To Seek Out And Force Such Writers Into More Popular Channels, To The Detriment Of Both Writer And An Unprepared Public.

I Know Why Families Were Created With All Their Imperfections. They Humanize You. They Are Made To Make You Forget Yourself Occasionally, So That The Beautiful Balance Of Life Is Not Destroyed.

We Also Write To Heighten Our Own Awareness Of Life... We Write To Taste Life Twice, In The Moment, And In Retrospection... We Write To Be Able To Transcend Our Life, To Reach Beyond It...to Teach Ourselves To Speak With Others, To Record The Journey Into The Labyrinth. We Write To Expand Our World When We Feel Strangled, Or Constricted, Or Lonely... When I Don't Write, I Feel My World Shrinking... I Feel I Lose My Fire And My Color.

When I Don't Write, I Feel My World Shrink. I Lose My Fire, My Color.

You Fall In Love With People's Minds.

Falling In Love

I Can Elect Something I Love And Absorb Myself In It.

To Write Is To Descend, To Excavate, To Go Underground.

Convalescence. Such An Utter Weakness That You Lie Like An Animal Hibernating, Playing Possum. You Float. You Are Adrift. Every Current Is Stronger Than You.

The Violence And Obscenity Are Left Unadulterated, As Manifestation Of The Mystery And Pain Which Ever Accompanies The Act Of Creation.

Reality Doesn’t Impress Me. I Only Believe In Intoxication, In Ecstasy, And When Ordinary Life Shackles Me. I Escape, One Way Or Another. No More Walls.

The Earth Is Heavy And Opaque Without Dreams.

How Wrong It Is For A Woman To Expect The Man To Build The World She Wants, Rather Than To Create It Herself.

He Had A Mania For Washing And Disinfecting Himself. . . . For Him The Only Danger Came From The Microbes That Attacked The Body. He Had Not Studied The Microbe Of Conscience Which Eats Into The Soul.

You Are So Terribly Nimble, So Clever. I Distrust Your Cleverness. You Make A Wonderful Pattern, Everything Is In Its Place, It Looks Convincingly Clear, Too Clear. And Meanwhile, Where Are You? Not On The Clear Surface Of Your Ideas, But You Have Already Sunk Deeper, Into Darker Regions, So That One Only Thinks One Has Been Given All Your Thoughts, One Only Imagines You Have Emptied Yourself In That Clarity. But There Are Layers And Layers - You're Bottomless, Unfathomable. Your Clearness Is Deceptive. You Are The Thinker Who Arouses Most Confusion In Me, Most Doubt, Most Disturbance.

Living Never Wore One Out So Much As The Effort Not To Live.

Jazz Is The Music Of The Body.

It Is Possible I Never Learned The Names Of Birds In Order To Discover The Bird Of Peace, The Bird Of Paradise, The Bird Of The Soul, The Bird Of Desire. It Is Possible I Avoided Learning The Names Of Composers And Their Music The Better To Close My Eyes And Listen To The Mystery Of All Music As An Ocean. It May Be I Have Not Learned Dates In History In Order To Reach The Essence Of Timelessness. It May Be I Never Learned Geography The Better To Map My Own Routes And Discover My Own Lands. The Unknown Was My Compass. The Unknown Was My Encyclopedia. The Unnamed Was My Science And Progress.

We Cannot Cure The Evils Of Politics With Politics.

The Personal Life Deeply Lived Always Expands Into Truths Beyond Itself.

The Obstacle Became His Alibi For Weakness.

Jeanne, I Fell Asleep Among The Paintings, Where I Could Sit For Many Days Worshipping Your Portrait. I Fell In Love With Your Portrait, Jeanne, Because It Will Never Change. I Have Such A Fear Of Seeing You Grow Old, Jeanne, I Fell In Love With An Unchanging You That Will Never Be Taken Away From Me. I Was Wishing You Would Die, So That No One Could Take You Away From Me, And I Would Love The Painting Of You As You Would Look Eternally.

I Miss The Animal Buoyancy Of New York, The Animal Vitality. I Did Not Mind That It Had No Meaning And No Depth.

I Only Believe In Fire. Life. Fire. Being Myself On Fire I Set Others On Fire. Never Death. Fire And Life.

I Palliate The Sufferings Of Others. Yes I See Myself As Softening The Blows, Dissolving Acids, Neutralizing Poisons, Every Moment Of The Day. I Try To Fulfill The Wishes Of Others, To Perform Miracles. I Exert Myself Performing Miracles.

Suffering Of Others

Why Do I Doubt Her? Perhaps She Is Just Very Sensitive, And Hypersensitive People Are False When Others Doubt Them; They Waver. And One Thinks Them Insincere. Yet I Want To Believe Her. At The Same Time It Does Not Seem So Very Important That She Should Love Me. It Is Not Her Role. I Am So Filled With My Love Of Her. And At The Same Time I Feel That I Am Dying. Our Love Would Be Death. The Embrace Of Imaginings.

Tranquillity Is Contagious, Peace Is Contagious. One Only Thinks Of The Contagiousness Of Illness, But There Is The Contagion Of Serenity And Joy.

Truth Is Something Which Can't Be Told In A Few Words. Those Who Simplify The Universe Only Reduce The Expansion Of Its Meaning.

I Will Not Adjust Myself To The World. I Am Adjusted To Myself.

People Living Deeply Have No Fear Of Death.

One Handles Truths Like Dynamite. Literature Is One Vast Hypocrisy, A Giant Deception, Treachery. All Writers Have Concealed More Than They Revealed.

When We Blindly Adopt A Religion, A Political System, A Literary Dogma, We Become Automatons. We Cease To Grow.

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.

We Speak Of The Masculine And The Feminine, But They Are The Wrong Labels. It Is Really More A Matter Of Poetry Versus Intellectualization.

I Wanted To Remember In Order To Be Able To Return.

We Do Not Grow Absolutely, Chronologically. We Grow Sometimes In One Dimension, And Not In Another, Unevenly. We Grow Partially. We Are Relative. We Are Mature In One Realm, Childish In Another. The Past, Present, And Future Mingle And Pull Us Backward, Forward, Or Fix Us In The Present. We Are Made Of Layers, Cells, Constellations.

Houses Turn To Corpses Overnight When We Cease To Live And Love In Them.

If I Love You It Means We Share The Same Fantasies, The Same Madnesses

The Cynic Is A Coward. He Foresees All Barrenness So That Barrenness Can Never Surprise Him.

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

Sometimes We Reveal Ourselves When We Are Least Like Ourselves.

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.

Hollywood Is A Mirage Factory.

What Everyone Forgets Is That Passion Is Not Merely A Heightened Sensual Fusion But A Way Of Life Which Produces, As In The Mystics, An Ecstatic Awareness Of The Whole Of Life.

The Personal, If It Is Deep Enough, Becomes Universal, Mythical, Symbolic.

No One Was Ever Born Without That Light Or Flame Of Life. Some Event, Some Person Stifles Or Drowns It Altogether. I Was Always Tempted To Resuscitate Such Men By My Own Joyousness Or Luminosity.when I Break Glasses In A Night Club, As The Russians Do, When My Unconscious Breaks Out In Wild Rebellions, It Is Against Life Which Has Crippled These Idealistic, Romantic Men. I Respect These Men, Cold, Pure, Faithful, Devoted, Moral, Delicate, Sensitive, And Unequal To Life, More Than I Respect The Tough-minded Ones Who Return Three Blows To One Received, Who Kill Those Who Hurt Them.

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.

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.

We Are Like Sculptors, Constantly Carving Out Of Others The Image We Long For, Need, Love Or Desire, Often Against Reality, Against Their Benefit, And Always, In The End, A Disappointment, Because It Does Not Fit Them.

Shame Is The Lie Someone Told You About Yourself.

To Write At The Same Temperature At Which I Live I Should Write Nothing But Poetry.

Our Psychological Reality, Which Lies Below The Surface, Frightens Us Because It Endlessly Surprises Us And Drives Us In A Direction Which Society's Rules And Organizations Define As Wrong Or Dangerous.

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.

It Amazes Me That You Feel That Each Time You Write A Story You Give Away One Of Your Dreams And You Feel The Poorer For It. But Then You Have Not Thought That This Dream Is Planted In Others, Others Begin To Live It Too, It Is Shared, It Is The Beginning Of Friendship And Love. How Is This World Made Which You Enjoy, The Friends Around Me That You Love? They Came Because I First Gave Away My Stories.

Out Of The Red And Silver And The Long Cry Of Alarm To The Poet Who Survives In All Human Beings, As The Child Survives In Him; To This Poet She Threw An Unexpected Ladder In The Middle Of The City And Ordained, 'climb!

I Want To Live Darkly And Richly In My Femaleness.

Empowering Women

You Cannot Save People. You Can Only Love Them.

I Like Extravagance. Letters Which Give The Postman A Stiff Back To Carry, Books Which Overflow From Their Covers, Sexuality Which Bursts The Thermometers.

I Have No Fear Of God, And Yet Fear Keeps Me Awake At Night,fear Of The Devil. And If I Believe In The Devil, I Must Believe In God. And If Evil Is Abhorrent To Me, I Must Be A Saint. Henry, Save Me From Beatification, From The Horrors Of Static Perfection. Precipitate Me Into The Inferno.

There Is A Resemblance Between Men And Women, Not A Contrast. When A Man Begins To Recognize His Feeling, The Two Unite. When Men Accept The Sensitive Side Of Themselves, They Come Alive.

In Every Relationship, Sooner Or Later, There Is A Court Scene. Accusations, Counter-accusations, A Trial, A Verdict.

My Trunk, Valises And My Mind Are Overpacked.

The Only Abnormality Is The Incapacity To Love.

You Are The Poet, You Walk Inside My Dreams.

At First She Beckoned And Lured One Into Her World; Then, She Blurred The Passageways, Confused All The Images, As If To Elude Detection.

The Important Task Of Literature Is To Free Man, Not To Censor Him, And That Is Why Puritanism Was The Most Destructive And Evil Force Which Ever Oppressed People And Their Literature: It Created Hypocrisy, Perversion, Fears, Sterility.

New York Seems Conducted By Jazz, Animated By It. It Is Essentially A City Of Rhythm.

Life Is So Fluid That One Can Only Hope To Capture The Living Moment, To Capture It Alive And Fresh ... Without Destroying That Moment.

I Reserve The Right To Love Many Different People At Once, And To Change My Prince Often.

Different Peoples

There Is No Bleaker Moment In Life Of The City Than That One Which Crosses The Boundary Lines Between Those Who Have Not Slept All Night And Those Who Are Going To Work. It Was For Sabina As If Two Races Of Men And Women Lived On Earth, The Night People And The Day People, Never Meeting Face To Face Except At This Moment.

My Ideas Usually Come Not At My Desk Writing But In The Midst Of Living.

We Celebrate Peace. Yet We Pay No Attention To The Ways Of Curing Aggression In Human Beings. And When One Sees In Psychoanalysis Hostility Disappearing As People Conquer Their Fears, One Wonders If The Cure Is Not There.

The Frenchman, By Nature, Is Sensuous And Sensitive. He Has Intelligence, Which Makes Him Tired Of Life Sooner Than Other Kinds Of Men. He Is Not Athletic: He Sees The Futility Of The Pursuit Of Fame; The Climate At Times Depresses Him.

The Suppression Of Inner Patterns In Favor Of Patterns Created By Society Is Dangerous To Us.

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

In Creation Alone There Is The Possibility Of Perfection.

When She Closed Her Eyes She Felt He Had Many Hands, Which Touched Her Everywhere, And Many Mouths, Which Passed So Swiftly Over Her, And With A Wolflike Sharpness, His Teeth Sank Into Her Fleshiest Parts. Naked Now, He Lay His Full Length Over Her. She Enjoyed His Weight On Her, Enjoyed Being Crushed Under His Body. She Wanted Him Soldered To Her, From Mouth To Feet. Shivers Passed Through Her Body.

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.

Either One Fails In One's Art Or In One's Life.

Now That I Am Moving, I Am Afraid. Where Am I Going?

Life Shrinks Or Expands In Proportion To One's Courage.

You Don't Find Love, It Finds You. It's Got A Little Bit To Do With Destiny, Fate, And What's Written In The Stars.

I Don't Mind Working, Holding My Ground Intellectually, Artistically; But As A Woman, Oh, God, As A Woman I Want To Be Dominated

I Am Apparently Gentle, Unstable, And Full Of Pretenses. I Will Die A Poet Killed By The Nonpoets, Will Renounce No Dream, Resign Myself To No Ugliness, Accept Nothing Of The World But The One I Made Myself. I Wrote, Lived, Loved Like Don Quixote, And On The Day Of My Death I Will Say: ‘excuse Me, It Was All A Dream,’ And By That Time I May Have Found One Who Will Say: ‘not At All, It Was True, Absolutely True.’

I Am Lonely, Yet Not Everybody Will Do. I Don't Know Why, Some People Fill The Gaps And Others Emphasize My Loneliness. In Reality Those Who Satisfy Me Are Those Who Simply Allow Me To Live With My ''idea Of Them.

He Was Jealous Of Her Future, And She Of His Past.

This Diary Is My Kief, Hashish And Opium Pipe. This Is My Drug And My Vice.

I Want To Make My Own Discoveries…….penetrate The Evil Which Attracts Me

She Makes Use Of The Soft Of The Bread For A Napkin. She Falls Asleep At Times With Shoes On, On Unmade Beds. When A Little Money Comes In, June Buys Delicacies, Strawberries In The Winter, Caviar And Bath Salts.

Throw Your Dreams Into Space Like A Kite, And You Do Not Know What It Will Bring Back, A New Life, A New Friend, A New Love, A New Country.

He Does Not Need Opium. He Has The Gift Of Reverie.

Tropical Nights Are Hammocks For Lovers.

If A Person Continues To See Giants, It Means He Is Still Looking At The World Through The Eyes Of A Child.

There Is Not One Big Cosmic Meaning For All, There Is Only The Meaning We Each Give To Our Life, An Individual Meaning, An Individual Plot, Like An Individual Novel, A Book For Each Person.

Every Individual Is Representative Of The Whole . . . And Should Be Intimately Understood, And This Would Give A Far Greater Understanding Of Mass Movements And Sociology.

I Was Stirred Only Like A Leaf In The Wind, That Is All. . .

Leaves In The Wind

Most Artists Have Retired Too Absolutely; They Grow Rusty, Inflexible To The Flow Of Currents.

If What Proust Says Is True, That Happiness Is The Absence Of Fever, Then I Will Never Know Happiness. For I Am Possessed By A Fever For Knowledge, Experience, And Creation.

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.

I Told Her, "we Have Both Lost Ourselves, But Sometimes We Reveal The Most When We Are Least Like Ourselves. I Am Not Trying To Think Any More. I Can't Think When I Am With You. You Are Like Me, Wishing For A Perfect Moment, But Nothing Too Long Imagined Can Be Perfect In A Worldly Way. Neither One Of Us Can Say Just The Right Thing. We Are Overwhelmed. Let Us Be Overwhelmed. It Is So Lovely, So Lovely. I Love You June.

I Made No Resolutions For The New Year. The Habit Of Making Plans, Of Criticizing, Sanctioning And Molding My Life, Is Too Much Of A Daily Event For Me.

You Live Like This, Sheltered, In A Delicate World, And You Believe You Are Living.

I Must Be A Mermaid, Rango. I Have No Fear Of Depths And A Great Fear Of Shallow Living.

We Are Beginning To See The Influence Of Dream Upon Reality And Reality Upon Dream.

They Courted The Face On The Screen, The Face Of Translucence, The Face Of Wax On Which Men Found It Possible To Imprint The Image Of Their Fantasy.

The Creative Personality Never Remains Fixed On The First World It Discovers. It Never Resigns Itself To Anything.

Atrophy Of Feeling Creates Criminals.

To Love And To Labor Is The Sum Of Living.

At Sixteen, Sabina Took Moon Baths, First Of All, Because Everyone Else Took Sun Baths, And Second, She Admitted, Because She Had Been Told It Was Dangerous.

Self-destructive Patterns Cause As Much Suffering As Outer Catastrophes.

When I Cannot Bear Outer Pressures Anymore, I Begin To Put Order In My Belongings...as If Unable To Organize And Control My Life, I Seek To Exert This On The World Of Objects.

If You Are Terribly Truthful, The Ground Will Always Move From Under You, And You Will Have To Shift With The Constantly Shifting Truth.

For You And For Me The Highest Moment, The Keenest Joy, Is Not When Our Minds Dominate But When We Lose Our Minds, And You And I Both Lose It In The Same Way, Through Love.

Violence Is A Symptom Of Impotence.

One Discovers That Destiny Can Be Diverted, That One Does Not Have To Remain In Bondage To The First Wax Imprint Made On Childhood Sensibilities. Once The Deforming Mirror Has Been Smashed, There Is A Possibility Of Wholeness. There Is A Possibility Of Joy.

Great Repressions Create Dualities.

I Have No Brakes On...analysis Is For Those Who Are Paralyzed By Life.

Notes Fly So Much Farther Than Words. There Is No Other Way To Reach The Infinite.

There Are Books Which We Read Early In Life, Which Sink Into Our Consciousness And Seem To Disappear Without Leaving A Trace. And Then One Day We Find, In Some Summing-up Of Our Life And Put Attitudes Towards Experience, That Their Influence Has Been Enormous.

Everything But Happiness Is Neurosis.

Dreams Are Essential To Life.

And Silence. She Liked The Silence Most Of All. The Silence In Which The Body, Senses, The Instincts, Are More Alert, More Powerful, More Sensitized, Live A More Richly Perfumed And Intoxication Life, Instead Of Transmuting Into Thoughts, Words, Into Exquisite Abstractions, Mathematics Of Emotion In Place Of Violent Impact, The Volcanic Eruptions Of Fever, Lust And Delight.

The Final Lesson A Writer Learns Is That Everything Can Nourish The Writer. The Dictionary, A New Word, A Voyage, An Encounter, A Talk On The Street, A Book, A Phrase Learned.

Had I Not Created My Whole World, I Would Certainly Have Died In Other People’s.

I Sat There For Three Hours And Did Not Feel The Time Or The Boredom Of Our Talk And Its Foolish Disconnection. As Long As I Could Hear His Voice, I Was Quite Lost, Quite Blind, Quite Outside My Own Self.

Experience Teaches Acceptance Of The Imperfect As Life.

Eroticism Is One Of The Basic Means Of Self-knowledge, As Indispensable As Poetry.

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.

Perhaps A Child, Like A Cat, Is So Much Inside Of Himself That He Does Not See Himself In The Mirror.

When One Is Pretending The Entire Body Revolts.

Destruction Is Ultimately Self-destruction.

Self Destruction

Beware Of Allowing A Tactless Word, A Rebuttal, A Rejection To Obliterate The Whole Sky

The Two Men Who Have Done The Greatest Harm To The World Are Christ And Columbus. Christ Taught Us Guilt And Sacrifice, To Live Only In The Other World, And Columbus Discovered America And Materialism.

Our Culture Made A Virtue Of Living Only As Extroverts. We Discouraged The Inner Journey, The Quest For A Center. So We Lost Our Center And Have To Find It Again.

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.

I Adore The Struggle You Carry In Yourself. I Adore Your Terrifying Sincerity.

Life Is Truly Known Only To Those Who Suffer, Lose, Endure Adversity And Stumble From Defeat To Defeat.

I Walk Ahead Of Myself In Perpetual Expectancy Of Miracles.

The Poet Is One Who Is Able To Keep The Fresh Vision Of The Child Alive.

Descendants Of Pigeons Once Fed By Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin And Many Other Famous Lovers Are Still Being Fed, And The Sudden Sound When They All Rise Together, Frightened Away, Is Like The Sound Of Giant Sails Flapping.

We Travel, Some Of Us Forever, To Seek Other States, Other Lives, Other Souls.

I Must Know, He Thinks. It Must Be Clear To Me. There Is A World Which Is Closed To Him, A World Of Shadings, Gradations, Nuances, And Subtleties. He Is A Genius And Yet He Is Too Explicit. June Slips Between His Fingers. You Cannot Posses Without Loving.

A War Regarded As Inevitable Or Even Probable, And Therefore Much Prepared For, Has A Very Good Chance Of Eventually Being Fought.

The Complaints Of The Child In Us Will Never Cease Lamenting Until It Is Consoled, Answered, Understood. Only Then Will It Lie Still In Us, Like Our Fears. It Will Die In Peace And Leave Us What The Child Leaves To The Man - The Sense Of Wonder.

It Is In The Movements Of Emotional Crisis That Human Beings Reveal Themselves Most Accurately.

His Life Rushes Onward In Such Torrential Rhythm That...only Angels And Devils Can Catch The Tempo Of It.

The Self Is Merely The Lens Through Which We See Others And The World.

Perfection Is Static, And I Am In Full Progress.

I Would Like To Have Your Sureness. I Am Waiting For Love, The Core Of A Woman's Life." Don't Wait For It," I Said. "create A World, Your World. Alone. Stand Alone. And Then Love Will Come To You, Then It Comes To You. It Was Only When I Wrote My First Book That The World I Wanted To Live In Opened To Me.

The Dangerous Time When Mechanical Voices, Radios, Telephones, Take The Place Of Human Intimacies, And The Concept Of Being In Touch With Millions Brings A Greater And Greater Poverty In Intimacy And Human Vision.

It Is Easy To Love And There Are So Many Ways To Do It.

Life Is A Process Of Becoming, A Combination Of States We Have To Go Through. Where People Fail Is That They Wish To Elect A State And Remain In It. This Is A Kind Of Death.

Trending Author

Frederick W. Smith

Stephen Ambrose

Dominic Monaghan

Category