"One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.
Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.
The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy; I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of them is not my concern.
The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love.
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive."
- Re: Quotes from Henry Miller, “the happiest man aliveposted on 03/19/2005
巧极了,我今天下午在阿姗的书架上翻到了anais nin写的henry and june, 这本日记后来被拍成了电影。
93年左右看了nin写的部分日记,罗罗嗦嗦,挺烦的,那时特别瞧不起这个女人。就那么点儿事儿,来来回回讲的。
Henry Miller我也特瞧不起的。最烦他那本北回归线,完全是一个阳痿男人的fantacy。 最瞧不起阳痿的男人:)
- posted on 03/19/2005
Quotes from Anais Nin (1903-1977)
Anais Nin is best known for her journals, published in ten volumes as The Diary of Anais Nin. Her ideas have influenced feminist thinking -- in agreement or reaction -- although she herself moved away from political forms of feminism.
Selected Anais Nin Quotations
• There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
• We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
• Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage.
• Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.
• 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.
• Ordinary life does not interest me.
• 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.
• 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.
• Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
• I write emotional algebra.
• We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.
• To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.
• I am in a beautiful prison from which I can only escape by writing.
• My diary is a mirror telling the story of a dreamer who, a long long time ago went through life the way one reads a book.
• The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
• 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.
• Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child-bearing and man-bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment the man rests inside of her.
• Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.
• I have the right to love many people at once and to change my prince often.
• What I cannot love, I overlook.
• Dreams are necessary to life.
• Dreams have helped me to live.
• Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensible as poetry.
• We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.
• The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.
• Jazz is the music of the body.
• Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.
• 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.
• I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by loving.
Related Resources for Anais Nin
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