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Anais Nin

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Famous Anais Nin Quotes

“From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.”

PeopleInspirationalGivingImportantLawFocusEventsAngerWorkersNegativityIn-lawsDestroyersTake ControlMeddlingCo WorkerSister In LawBackstabbing
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“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.”

PeopleKnowsWayWantNeedsFeelsLooksKindChildrenAsksWaitingToo MuchWisePrideGoes OnShopsHatsAddressesDriversRetreatDefectsTaxiOverflowTrivialityWait For HimLafayette
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“Many couples, many people, are not living with real human beings, but with their ghosts. Who has not followed for years the spell of a particular tone of voice, from voice to voice, as the fetishist follows a beautiful foot, scarcely seeing the woman herself? A voice, a mouth, an eye, all stemming from the original fountain of our first desire, directing it, enslaving us, until we choose to unravel the fatal web and free ourselves.”

PeopleYearsFirstsHumansRealEyeBeautifulDesireVoiceHuman BeingsSeeingFeetParticularCoupleMouthsOriginalsGhostToneSpellsFountainReal Human
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“I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery Benedictine. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it.”

PeopleKnowsMenWantLooksBodyBeautifulFacesDesireDrinkDrugIntimateBitesFierceBrushesTornHandsomeNaiveBeautiful WomenFieryHandsome Men
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“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.”

PeopleIfsMenTwoMomentsEarthFacesNightLinesRaceCitiesMen And WomenCrossesMeetingsBoundariesWorking ItGoing To WorkAll NightFace To Face
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“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.”

PeopleIfsSometimesDoneFacesCertainNaturalCrimeRegretLipsCommittedHarmCatastropheRevolverIrrepressible
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“The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery. Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream.”

PeopleIfsFeelsMeanDoeEnoughStoriesEmotionPaintingElementsDiscoveryAll ThingsUniversalThemePrimitiveDiariesPenetrateSymbolicPersonal RelationshipsPersonal Stories
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“The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.”

PeopleMenWorldDiesFightingHoursBehindsQualityRolesFiguresObjectsWeaknessSpreadCuriousPreservesInsultDesksCurtainsItemsCollectorsRebornPassivityPostponementAlways Alone
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“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.”

PeopleThinkingWantFeelsShouldBelieveDoeImportantSeemsWould BeRolesDoubtDyingFilledEmbraceSensitiveOur LoveInsincere
Author:Anais Nin
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