“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
— Anaïs Nin
“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
“Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.”
“You cannot save people. You can only love them.”
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
“My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.”
“People living deeply have no fear of death.”
“Good things happen to those who hustle.”
“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”
“You fall in love with people’s minds.”
“Ordinary life does not interest me.”
“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.”
“How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?”
“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.”
“Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
“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.”
“Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.”
“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.”
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
“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.”
“The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.”
“I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.”
“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.”
“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”
“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
“We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.”
“The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”
“We have been poisoned by fairy tales.”
“Dreams are necessary to life.”
“We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art – we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.”
“Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.”
“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’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.”
“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”
“I write emotional algebra.”
“In chaos, there is fertility.”
“Passion gives me moments of wholeness.”
“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.”
“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.”
“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.”
“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.”
“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”
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