Background Image

...

The Struggle To Emerge Out Of The Past, Clean Of Memories; The Inadequacy Of Our Hearts To Cut Life Into Separate And Final Portions; The Pain Of This Constant Ambivalence And Interrelation Of Emotions; The Hunger For Frontiers Against Which We Might Learn As Upon Closed Doors Before We Proceed Forward; The Struggle Against Diffusion, New Beginnings, Against Finality In Acts Without Finality Or End, In Our Cursedly Repercussive Being.

-Anais Nin

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

The Struggle To Emerge

Anais Nin

...

The Struggle To Emerge Out Of The Past, Clean Of Memories; The Inadequacy Of Our Hearts To Cut Life Into Separate And Final Portions; The Pain Of This Constant Ambivalence And Interrelation Of Emotions; The Hunger For Frontiers Against Which We Might Learn As Upon Closed Doors Before We Proceed Forward; The Struggle Against Diffusion, New Beginnings, Against Finality In Acts Without Finality Or End, In Our Cursedly Repercussive Being.

Views: 81593

Topic

More From Anais Nin

One May Gain One Truth At The Expense Of Another.

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.

Whenever You Do Something That Is Not Aligned With The Yearning Or Your Soul—you Create Suffering.

There Is No Denying That We Are Suffering From A Collective Neurosis And The Novel Which Does Not Face This Is Not A Novel Of Our Time.

Don't Let One Cloud Obliterate The Whole Sky.

Positive Thinking

Life Is A Full Circle, Widening Until It Joins The Circle Motions Of The Infinite.

The Impetus To Grow And Live Intensely Is So Powerful In Me I Cannot Resist It. I Will Work, I Will Love My Husband, But I Will Fulfill Myself.

The One Who Travels Like A Lover Searching For A New Passion Is Suddenly Blessed With New Eyes, New Ears, New Senses.

You Cannot Save People. You Can Only Love Them.

I Find That Life, Day By Day, Is Composed Of At Least One Joy, One Problem And One Sorrow. Then There Are The Smaller Ingredients: You Always Learn Something, Whether Useful Or Harmful - That Is Difficult To Analyze Until Later; You Always Give Something; You Alwayou Always Grow A Little In One Direction Or Another.

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

Something Is Always Born Of Excess: Great Art Was Born Of Great Terror, Great Loneliness, Great Inhibitions, Instabilities, And It Always Balances Them.

Nothing Too Long Imagined Can Be Perfect In A Wordly Way.

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.

Also, I Do Not Like The Companionship Of Women. They Are Petty And Personal. They Hang On To Their Mysteries And Secrets, They Act And Pretend. I Like The Character Of Men Better.

Anxiety Is Love's Greatest Killer, Because It Is Like The Stranglehold Of The Drowning.

There Is An Ugliness In Being Paid For Work One Does Not Like.

Then At Certain Moments I Remember One Of His Words And I Suddenly Feel The Sensual Woman Flaring Up, As If Violently Caressed. I Say The Word To Myself, With Joy. It Is At Such A Moment That My True Body Lives.

Life Is What We Make It, Always Has Been, Always Will Be...including Our Perception. Of It

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!

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

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.

Paris-new York, The Two High Tension Magnetic Poles Between Life, Life Of The Senses, Of The Spirit In Paris, And Life In Action In New York.

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.

Compassion For Our Parents Is The True Sign Of Maturity.

I Am An Excitable Person Who Only Understands Life Lyrically, Musically, In Whom Feelings Are Much Stronger As Reason.

All That Is Sacred And Taboo In The World Are Meaningless.

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

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.

You Fall In Love With People's Minds.

Falling In Love

Again I Take A Taxi To Clichy Address, But Feel That I Do Not Want To Go On Loving Henry More Actively Than He Loves Me (having Realized That Nobody Will Ever Love Me In That Overabundant, Overexpressive, Overthoughtful, Overhuman Way I Love People), And So I Will Wait For Him. So I Ask Taxi Driver To Drop Me At The Galeries Lafayette, Where I Begin To Look For A New Hat And To Shop For Christmas. Pride? I Don't Know. A Kind Of Wise Retreat. I Need People Too Much. So I Bury My Gigantic Defect, My Overflow Of Love, Under Trivialities, Like A Child. I Amuse Myself With A New Hat.

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

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.

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

I Spell 'god' With A Small 'g' Because I Do Not Believe In Him, But I Love To Swear By Him.

I Say Quotations Are Literary. They Are Good Only When Dealing With Ideas, Not With Experience. Experience Should Be Pure, Unique.

Someone Told Me The Delightful Story Of The Crusader Who Put A Chastity Belt On His Wife And Gave The Key To His Best Friend For Safekeeping, In Case Of His Death. He Had Ridden Only A Few Miles Away When His Friend, Riding Hard, Caught Up With Him, Saying 'you Gave Me The Wrong Key!

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

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.

Stories Are The Only Enchantment Possible, For When We Begin To See Our Suffering As A Story, We Are Saved.

The Value Of The Personal Relationship To All Things Is That It Creates Intimacy And Intimacy Creates Understanding And Understanding Creates Love.

Your Eyes Make Me Shy

Physical Experiences, Lacking The Joys Of Love, Depend On Twists And Perversions Of Pleasure. Abnormal Pleasures Kill The Taste For Normal Ones.

Last Night I Wept. I Wept Because The Process By Which I Have Become Woman Was Painful. I Wept Because I Was No Longer A Child With A Child's Blind Faith. I Wept Because My Eyes Were Opened To Reality....i Wept Because I Could Not Believe Anymore And I Love To Believe. I Can Still Love Passionately Without Believing. That Means I Love Humanly. I Wept Because I Have Lost My Pain And I Am Not Yet Accustomed To Its Absence.

I Often See How You Sob Over What You Destroy, How You Want To Stop And Just Worship; And You Do Stop, And Then A Moment Later You Are At It Again With A Knife, Like A Surgeon.

People Living Deeply Have No Fear Of Death.

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

My Life Is Not Possible To Tell. I Change Every Day, Change My Patterns, My Concepts, My Interpretations. I Am A Series Of Moods And Sensations. I Play A Thousand Roles. I Weep When I Find Others Play Them For Me. My Real Self Is Unknown. My Work Is Merely An Essence Of This Vast And Deep Adventure.

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.

Death From Disillusion Is Not Instantaneous, And There Are No Mercy Killers For The Disillusioned.

... Only Love Begets Love.

The Way To Recognize A Dead Word Is That It Exudes Boredom.

The Only Transformer And Alchemist That Turns Everything Into Gold Is Love. The Only Magic Against Death, Aging, Ordinary Life, Is Love.

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

We Cannot Cure The Evils Of Politics With Politics.

... And The Very Folds Of The Curtains Contained Secrets And Sighs.

Your Strength Is Soft, Indirect, Delicate, Tender, Womanly. But It Is Strength Just The Same.

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.

The Leaf Fall Of His Words, The Stained Glass Hues Of His Moods, The Rust In His Voice, The Smoke In His Mouth, His Breath On My Vision Like Human Breath Blinding A Mirror.

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.

We Don't See Things As They Are, We See Them As We Are.

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.

I Am A Failure As A Writer. The Publishers Won't Publish Me, The Bookshops Won't Carry My Books, The Critics Won't Write About Me. I Am Excluded From All Anthologies, And Completely Ignored.

I Only Regret That Everybody Wants To Deprive Me Of The Journal, Which Is The Only Steadfast Friend I Have, The Only One Which Makes My Life Bearable, Because My Happiness With Human Beings Is So Precarious, My Confiding Moods Rare, And The Least Sign Of Non-interest Is Enough To Silence Me. In The Journal I Am At Ease.

Guilt Is The One Burden Human Beings Can't Bear Alone.

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

The Unknown Was My Compass. The Unknown Was My Encyclopedia. The Unnamed Was My Science And Progress.

Anything I Can Not Transform Into Something Marvelous, I Let Go.

You Carry Away With You A Reflection Of Me, A Part Of Me. I Dreamed You; I Wished For Your Existence. You Will Always Be A Part Of My Life. If I Love You, It Must Be Because We Shared, At Some Moment, The Same Imaginings, The Same Madness, The Same Stage.

Warmth, Perfume, Rugs, Soft Lights, Books. They Do Not Appease Me. I Am Aware Of Time Passing, Of All The World Contains That I Have Not Seen, Of All The Interesting People I Have Not Met.

The Unconscious Can Become Destructive If It Is Disregarded And Thwarted.

Strange, Isn't It, That No Chemical Will Give A Human Being The Iridescence That Illusions Have Given Them? Give Me Your Hat.

Our Love Lives Because I Live.

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

I Cheat Him, I Deceive Him, Yet The World Does Not Sink In Sulphur-colored Mists. Madness Conquers. I Can No Longer Put My Mosaics Together. I Just Cry And Laugh.

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

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.

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.

Dreams Are Necessary To Life.

Secrets. Need To Disguise. The Novel Was Born Of This.

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

I Do Not Want To Be The Leader. I Refuse To Be The Leader. I Want To Live Darkly.

You Can Either Give Negativity Power Over Your Life Or You Can Choose Happiness Instead.

Destruction Is Ultimately Self-destruction.

Self Destruction

Sexual Intercourse... A Joyous, Joyous, Joyous, Joyous Impaling Of Woman On Man's Sensual Mast.

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.

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

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.

We Have Been Poisoned By Fairy Tales.

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.

I Know No Joy As Great As A Moment Of Rushing Into A New Love, No Ecstasy Like That Of A New Love.

We Write To Taste Life Twice, In The Moment, And In Retrospection.

I Prefer Empty Cages, Sabina, Until I Find A Unique Bird I Once Saw In My Dreams.

One Handles Truths Like Dynamite.

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.

This Great Handsomeness I Took Into Myself Later When He Desired Me, But I Took It As One Breathes Air, Or Swallows A Snowflake, Or Yields To The Sun.

This Image Of Herself As A Not Ordinary Women, An Image Which Was Trembling Now In His Eyes, Might Suddenly Disappear. Nothing More Difficult To Live Up To Than Men's Dreams.

Worlds Self Made Are So Full Of Monsters And Demons.

Keeping A Diary All My Life Helped Me To Discover Some Basic Elements Essential To The Vitality Of Writing.

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 Write Emotional Algebra.

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 Believe That In Judging Our Actions We Are More Severe Than Professional Judges. We Judge Not Only Our Actions, But Our Thoughts, Our Intentions, Our Secret Curses, Our Hidden Hate.

She Acquired The Certainty Of The Expansion Of Time By Depth Of Emotion, Range And Infinite Multiplicity Of Experience.

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 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.

There Are Two Ways To Reach Me: By Way Of Kisses Or By Way Of The Imagination. But There Is A Hierarchy: The Kisses Alone Don't Work.

Analysis Does Not Take Into Account The Creative Products Of Neurotic Desires.

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.

It's All Right For A Woman To Be, Above All, Human. I Am A Woman First Of All.

All The Art Of Analysis Consists In Saying A Truth Only When The Other Person Is Ready For It, Has Been Prepared For It By An Organic Process Of Gradation And Evolution.

Asia Discovered Two Remedies For The Cruelty Of Man, Art And Religion. America Discarded Both And Is Drowning In Hate And Aggressivity.

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.

It Takes Courage To Push Yourself To Places You Have Never Been Before... To Test Your Limits... To Break Through Barriers. And The Day Came When The Risk It Took To Stay Tight Inside The Bud Was More Painful Than The Risk It Took To Blossom.

The Earth Is Heavy And Opaque Without Dreams.

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

The Struggle To Emerge Out Of The Past, Clean Of Memories; The Inadequacy Of Our Hearts To Cut Life Into Separate And Final Portions; The Pain Of This Constant Ambivalence And Interrelation Of Emotions; The Hunger For Frontiers Against Which We Might Learn As Upon Closed Doors Before We Proceed Forward; The Struggle Against Diffusion, New Beginnings, Against Finality In Acts Without Finality Or End, In Our Cursedly Repercussive Being.

When You Possess Light Within, You See It Externally.

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

The Core Of Creation Is To Summon An Image And The Power To Work With The Image.

In My Dreams I Sleep With Everybody.

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

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.

Myself ... Is Merely An Instrument To Connect Life And A Myth

Tropical Nights Are Hammocks For Lovers.

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.

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

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

We Do Not Escape Into Philosophy, Psychology, And Art--we Go There To Restore Our Shattered Selves Into Whole Ones.

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

If One's Conscious Life Is Too Rigid, Too Regimented, Then The Surface May Crack At Times, And We Are Unprepared For The Strange Emotions Or Sensations We Experience.

In The World Of The Dreamer There Was Solitude: All The Exaltations And Joys Came In The Moment Of Preparation For Living. They Took Place In Solitude. But With Action Came Anxiety, And The Sense Of Insuperable Effort Made To Match The Dream, And With It Came Weariness, Discouragement, And The Flight Into Solitude Again. And Then In Solitude, In The Opium Den Of Remembrance, The Possibility Of Pleasure Again.

I Love Her For What She Has Dared To Be, For Her Hardness, Her Cruelty, Her Egoism, Her Perverseness, Her Demoniac Destructiveness. She Would Crush Me To Ashes Without Hesitation. She Is A Personality Created To The Limit. I Worship Her Courage To Hurt, And I Am Willing To Be Sacrificed To It. She Will Add The Sum Of Me To Her. She Will Be June Plus All That I Contain.

The Enemy Of A Love Is Never Outside, It's Not A Man Or Woman, It's What We Lack In Ourselves.

How Well I Know With What Burning Intensity You Live. You Have Experienced Many Lives Already, Including Several You Have Shared With Me- Full Rich Lives From Birth To Death, And You Just Have To Have These Rest Periods In Between.

The Dream Was Always Running Ahead Of Me. To Catch Up, To Live For A Moment In Unison With It, That Was The Miracle.

I Love Your Silences, They Are Like Mine. You Are The Only Being Before Whom I Am Not Distressed By My Own Silences. You Have A Vehement Silence, One Feels It Is Charged With Essences, It Is A Strangely Alive Silence, Like A Trap Open Over A Well, From Which One Can Hear The Secret Murmur Of The Earth Itself.

Anxiety Is Loves Greatest Killer.

Creation Which Cannot Express Itself Becomes Madness.

When Your Beauty Struck Me, It Dissolved Me. Deep Down, I Am Not Different From You. I Dreamed You, I Wished For Your Existence. I See In You That Part Of Me Which Is You. I Surrender My Sincerity Because If I Love You It Means We Share The Same Fantasies, We Share The Same Madness.

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!

My Trunk, Valises And My Mind Are Overpacked.

I'm Sick Of My Own Romanticism!

Idealism Is The Death Of The Body And The Imagination. All But Freedom, Utter Freedom, Is Death

A Man Who Lives Unrelated To Other Human Beings Dies. But A Man Who Lives Unrelated To Himself Also Dies.

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

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

When I Hear Of People Who Weary Of Each Other, I Believe It Is Because They Have Sought Virtues In Themselves Alone, Attractions Of Physical Beauty. Have They Based Their Love On Each Other's Thoughts? Who Can Weary Of Thoughts Which Change Every Day?

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.

Things Aren't The Way They Are, They're The Way You Are

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

I Believe One Writes Because One Has To Create A World In Which One Can Live.

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

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.

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.

The Morning I Got Up To Begin This Book I Coughed. Something Was Coming Out Of My Throat: It Was Strangling Me. I Broke The Thread Which Held It And Yanked It Out. I Went Back To Bed And Said: I Have Just Spat Out My Heart.

The Risk It Takes To Remain Tight Inside The Bud Is More Painful Than The Risk It Takes To Blossom. We Don't See Things As They Are, We See Them As We Are.

Introspection Is A Devouring Monster.

Memory Is A Great Betrayer.

Pain Is Something To Master, Not To Wallow In.

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.

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

The Love Of Only One Man Or One Woman Is An Enclosure.

Nothing Endures Unless It Has First Been Transposed Into A Myth, And The Great Advantage Of Myths Is That They Are Ladies With Portable Roots.

One Must Be Thrust Out Of A Finished Cycle In Life, And That Leap Is The Most Difficult To Make - To Part With One's Faith, One's Love, When One Would Prefer To Renew The Faith And Recreate The Passion.

Where The Myth Fails, Human Love Begins. Then We Love A Human Being, Not Our Dream, But A Human Being With Flaws.

I Don't Hear Your Words: Your Voice Reverberates Against My Body Like Another Kind Of Caress, Another Kind Of Penetration. I Have No Power Over Your Voice. It Comes Straight From You Into Me. I Could Stuff My Ears And It Would Find Its Way Into My Blood And Make It Rise.

Will You Come Down And Kiss Me Good Night?

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.

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

Solitude May Rust Your Words.

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

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.

You Live Out The Confusions Until They Become Clear.

The Secret Of Joy Is The Mastery Of Pain.

I Will Always Be The Virgin-prostitute, The Perverse Angel, The Two-faced Sinister And Saintly Woman.

Willingness To Explore Everything Is A Sign Of Strength. The Weak Ones Have Prejudices. Prejudices Are A Protection.

I Am In Great Terror Of Your Understanding By Which You Penetrate Into My World; And Then I Stand Revealed And I Have Shared My Kingdom With You.

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

Gold Never Comes To The Dreamers - Except In Dreams.

The Shell Is America's Most Active Contribution To The Formation Of Character. A Tough Hide. Grow It Early.

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.

Three Or Four Threads May Be Agitated, Like Telegraph Wires, At The Same Time, And If I Were To Tap Them All I Would Reveal Such A Mixture Of Innocence And Duplicity, Generosity And Calculation, Fear And Courage, I Cannot Tell The Whole Truth Simply Because I Would Have To Write Four Journals At Once.

What You Burnt, Broke, And Tore Is Still In My Hands. I Am The Keeper Of Fragile Things And I Have Kept Of You What Is Indissoluble.

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

Passion Gives Me Moments Of Wholeness.

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

Stations And Airports Are Rehearsals For Separations By Death.

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

She Walked In The Shadow Of Rango With A Great Feeling Of Being Taken Out Of Herself, Of Having No Knowledge Of What Was Happening To Her, Merely A Pervading Sense Of Flow.

We Love Best Those Who Are, Or Act For Us, A Self We Do Not Wish To Be Or Act Out.

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

Expressing Feelings Is Linked Directly With Creation... In This Ability To Tap The Sources Of Feeling And Imagination Lies The Secret Of Abundance.

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.

I Cannot Concentrate All My Friendship On Any Single One Of My Friends Because No One Is Complete Enough In Himself.

Cute Best Friend

Why One Writes Is A Question I Can Answer Easily, Having So Often Asked It Of Myself. I Believe One Writes Because One Has To Create A World In Which One Can Live. I Could Not Live In Any Of The Worlds Offered To Me - The World Of My Parents, The World Of War, The World Of Politics. I Had To Create A World Of My Own, Like A Climate, A Country, An Atmosphere In Which I Could Breathe, Reign, And Recreate Myself When Destroyed By Living. That, I Believe, Is The Reason For Every Work Of Art.

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

Adolescence Is Like Cactus.

I Don't Wish Power, Only Art -art And Passion.

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.

Trending Author

Category