Today
is Anaïs Nin’s birthday.
She would have been 112 years old.
If you aren't familiar, Nin was a French/Cuban author who lived from February
21, 1903 till January 14, 1977.
She
is known for her feminism and eroticism.
For her novels and her diaries that
she kept for 60+ years from the age of eleven until her death.
For
her passionate love affair and friendship with fellow author Henry Miller as well as several other literary figures.
Her
words have always touched my heart and spoken directly to my soul.
So
I thought it would be fitting for this weekend’s post to be a carefully curated
collection of some of my most cherished Nin quotes that have sparked something
real and powerful in me and hopefully they will do the same for you.
“You cannot save people. You can only love them.”
“The only abnormality is the
incapacity to love.”
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
“Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”
"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."
“Each friend represents a
world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting
that a new world is born.”
“We don’t have a language
for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.”
“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.”
"I love the abstract,
delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically."
( from a letter to Henry Miller)
“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.”
“And the day came when the
risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to
blossom.”
“I am an excitable person
who only understands life lyrically, musically, in
whom feelings are much
stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous
has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let
go. 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.”
“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.”
“You live like this,
sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a
book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you
are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first,
restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might
degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an
innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die
like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They
picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment
takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from
death. Some never awaken.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 sincerely
hope that the quotes I have shared in this post have stirred something within
and encourage you to explore her works further.
love
& light
-Katie
