Anais Nin quote-fest

In his LiveJournal, Philoserf quoted Nietzsche. That quote reminded me of something from Anais Nin. I had to go hunting through my quotation clip-files to find the one I was looking for, which was:
"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."

In looking for that quote, I was astonished to see just how many bits and pieces of her writing I had collected over the years, and how many of them seem applicable today, in my life, and in the lives of those who touch my own.

"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. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."


"Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together."

"Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living."


"There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery."

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection"

"The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements"

"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."

"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."

"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."

"The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself."

"People living deeply have no fear of death."

Her sensuality, her sexuality, and her expression of both has stuck with me my entire life, since my first reading of Little Birds at age 11.

"I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy."

"Electric flesh-arrows... traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm."

"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 naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."

"I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. 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. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding."

"I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic -- in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself."

And most suitable for me right now:
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."