“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.”
“Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.”
“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
“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.”
“Ordinary life does not interest me.”
“You fall in love with people’s minds.”
“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?”
“Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
“Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 secret of joy is the mastery of pain.”
“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 possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”
“I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.”
“We have been poisoned by fairy tales.”
“The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art – we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.”
“In chaos, there is fertility.”
“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.”
“Dreams are necessary to life.”
“There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.”
“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.”
“The obstacle became his alibi for weakness.”
“I write emotional algebra.”
“Passion gives me moments of wholeness.”
“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 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.”
“If you can’t create, you destroy.”
“I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.”
“Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.”
“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.”
“When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.”
“I hate men who are afraid of women’s strength.”
“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”
“What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.”
“Write. Write until it stops hurting.”
“I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.”
“I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”
“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.”
“Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.”
“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
“Your eyes make me shy.”
“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.”
“It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.”
“When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.”
“I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.”
“I either eat too much or starve myself. Sleep for 14 hours or have insomniac nights. Fall in love very hard or hate passionately. I don’t know what grey is. I never did.”
“We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.”
“Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.”
“I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.”
“Living never wore one so much as the effort not to live.”
“I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood.”
“Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.”
“When you possess light within, you see it externally.”
“I am a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough.”
“Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.”
“To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.”
“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.”
“I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.”
“I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.”
“The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison, was the miracle.”
“Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.”
“Only when the poet and the scientist work in unison will we have living experiences and knowledge of the marvels of the universe as they are being discovered.”
“I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.”
“I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.”
“This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.”
“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.”
“What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.”
“The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable, which is the lost faith.”
“Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one’s self from enslavement by the earth.”
“The love of only one man or one woman is an enclosure.”
“He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it.”
“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.”
“She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.”
“What I cannot love, I overlook.”
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