Meteora, Greece - 2007
1. "Absurdity is the reaction of the intellect to events, it is not poetry or fantasy."
2. "Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age."
3. "A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked…"
4. “All elegant women have acquired a technique of weeping which has no . . . fatal effect on the make-up.”
5. "And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
6. "And when I speak of neurosis I really mean nothing more than what we used to call romanticism: that is, wanting the impossible and then being unhappy if it was found to be impossible."
7. "Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. 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."
8. "Art was the prescription for sanity and relief from the terrors and pains of human life."
9. "As children, we are made to fell we will only be loved if we are good (in the parent's terms). As soon as we begin to affirm our real selves, parents begin to reject us. We grow up with the idea that if we are ourselves we will be rejected. So, as artists, in our work e express our real self. But we keep the fear of not being loved for this real self. And timidity and shyness are the symptoms. A timidity we can overcome with those who understand and accept us. Now when I have to face the world with my real self expose in he writing, there is a crisis. Am I going to be accepted, approved, loved, or punished and rejected? Hence the fear."
10. “But I need a place where I can shout and weep. I have to be a Spanish savage at some time of the day. I record here the hysteria life causes in me. The overflow of an undisciplined extravagance. To hell with taste and art, with all contractions and polishings. Here I shout, I dance, I weep, I gnash my teeth, I go mad - all by myself, in bad English, in chaos. It will keep me sane for the world and for art.”
11. "But I think the greatest problem we have -- and I'm sure you have it too -- is the fear of someone reading over our shoulders, of someone passing judgment on our secret selves."
12. “...curious way that my idealism has been mixed with my fatalism, so that I can possess the soul of a dreamer and that of a cynic at the same time...”
13. "...depression can be more clearly understood as coming to those who are not willing to be depressed."
14. "Discovering other' weaknesses is not going to prove your strength. We all have weaknesses...The friend is the one how goes out to strengthen this weakness, but not to attack it."
15. “Do I feel my own self definite, encompassable? I know its boundary lines. There are experiences I shy away from. But my curiosity, creativeness, urge me beyond these bondaries, to transcend my character. My imagination pushes me into unknown, unexplored, dangerous realms. Yet there is always my fundamental nature, and I am never deceived by my "intellectual" adventures, or my literary exploits. I enlarge and expand my self; I do not like to be just one Anaïs, whole, familiar, contained. As soon as someone defines me. I do as June does; I seek escape from the confinements of definition.”
16. “Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.”
17. "Don't wait for it. Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you , then it comes to you."
18. “Dreams are necessary to life."
19. “Dreams have helped me to live.”
20. ”Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the action stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.”
21. “Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.”
22. "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."
23. “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.”
24. “Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensible as poetry.”
25. "Every difficult situation into which you are sometimes thrown has some kind of opening somewhere, even if it is only by way of the dream."
26. "Everyone is jealous. Some admit it, others do not. It is a perversity to be jealous of the past because the past is usually made of ashes."
27. “Finding one's self in a book is a second birth; and you are the only one who knows that at times men behave like women and women like men, and that all these distinctions are mock distinctions.”
28. "From all men I was different, and myself, but I see in you that part of me which is you."
29. “He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.”
30. “He had a mania for washing and disinfecting Himself… For him the only danger came from the microbes that attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which eats into the soul.”
31. “How beautiful the snow is!
Pure and white as an angel.
The children play in it,
and even babies stretch their arms
As a sign of welcome.
She should be happy in her white gown
which is real fur, although very cold.
It is pure and spotless
Except where people walk on it.”
32. “How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.”
33. "I always used art to put myself together again, and that is why I favored the artist, because I learned from him this creating out of nothing."
34. "I am enmeshed in my lies, and I want absolution. I cannot tell the truth because I have felt the heads of men in my womb. The truth would be death-dealing and I prefer fairytales. I am wrapped in lies which do not penetrate my soul. As if the lies I tell were like costumes."
35. "I am like a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough."
36. “I am not interested in fiction. I want faithfulness.”
37. “I don't understand it all. I had never been aware of that immense empty space that can only be filled by a Shadow that my mind has created, that my dreams have given a soul.
38. "I don't want to be a tourist in the world of images. I want to create something with them."
39. “If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.”
40. “I feel a fatigue of the tongue seeking to utter impossible things until it twists itself into a knot and chokes me.”
41. "If enough people struggle against limitations of all kinds the world would be altered anyway, and changes made from the inside"
42. "If we could but make friends with our inner selves, come to terms with our own darkness, then there would be no trouble from without."
43. “If we could only write simultaneously all the levels on which we live, all at once. The whole truth!”
44. "If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation."
45. “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.”
46. "If you're negative, you're going to find causes for negativity."
47. "If you live passionately, you're bound to get into confused states."
48. "I go in to come out."
49. “I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.”
50. “I have the capacity to live several lives--one does not satisfy me."
51. “I like to feel that I have transcended my destiny.”
52. "I looked upon a clock to find the truth. The hours were passing like ivory chess figures, striking piano notes, and the minutes raced on wires mounted like tin soldiers. Hours like tall ebony women with gongs between their legs, tolling continuously so that I could not count them. I heard the rolling of my heart-beats; I heard the footsteps of my dreams, and the beat of time was lost among them like the face of truth."
53. "I mastered the mechanisms of life the better to bend it to the will of the dream."
54. "In chaos there is fertility."
55. “In my hours of profound discouragement I looked up to his strength and self-confidence. It is a curious example of the irony of fate to find that he does not possess these things. I, in my weakness, am the stronger of the two... Where shall this lead us? I who believed myself made to cling, thrown upon my own strength.”
56. "In order to change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard."
57. "In the infinite there is no impasse."
58. "In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again."
59. "In wanting to protect ourselves, we often really entomb ourselves."
60. “I possess a power of magic ... [to] destroy the balance of a well-designed destiny -- with my diabolical mind.”
61. "I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing."
62. “Is devotion to others a cover for the hungers and the needs of the self, of which one is ashamed? I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.”
63. “I shiver when people boast of having been born in the same bed in which they hope they will die. The quest for fixed values seems to me a quest for immobility and stagnation.”
64. "I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me."
65. "It's a million times better to risk being deserted or betrayed than to withdraw into a fortress of alienation, shut the door and break the contact with others. Because then we really die. That is death. that is emotional death."
66. "It is only in such human relationships that one insists on one's own identity and separation from myths."
67. “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.”
68. "It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
69. "I took everything in, and the more you take in the more strength you find waiting to accomplish things and to expand your life."
70. “I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.”
71. “I want the firsthand knowledge of everything, not fiction, intimate experience only. . . . I don't care for films, newspapers, "reportages," the radio. I only want to be involved while it is being lived.”
72. "I want to dance and laugh. I want to dance. Nothing will shatter my individual world. No storm or sea on earth."
73. “I want to live only for ecstasy. Small doses, moderate loves, all half-shades, leave me cold. I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers.”
74. “I will never give myself entirely to anything...I will never escape from myself, neither through love, nor motherhood, nor art. My self is like the God of those of little faith, who see him everywhere, always, and cannot flee this obsession and this vision."
75. ”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.”
76. “I write emotional algebra.”
77. “Last night it was hot and I was leaning on the sill of the open window in the living room. Then my imagination got the better of me. A sinlge idea had taken possession of my dreams, a thing I had never, never thought of, an emptieness that I had never felt. I was alone and something was missing. It wasn't the love of my mother, my brothers or the rest of my family; I knew that I wanted someone very strong, very powerful, very handsome who would me and whom I could love with all my heart. It is an image or an idol that my dreams have created and that I am searching for in mortal form. Does he exist? And there, under the starry sky, the smiling moon, face to face with a horizon that doesn't go further than the end of the street, with my head in my hands, I sent a very sad prayer into infinite space: Love me, someone!
78. "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."
79. ”Life only became real when I wrote about it.”
80. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
81. "Life would be more bearable if I looked at it as an adventure and a tale"
82. “Like a parlor game in which questions are asked -- what is your favorite flower? Your favorite piece of music? My father was pacing up and down the long, red-tiled floor of the studio, firing questions at me: What about religion? What about politics? What are your ideas on morals? And so exultant because I answered them as he wished me to.
It is as if he had educated me. He says, "We do not need to lie to each other." Always the same wish, not to have to lie, but we will, of course, at the first sign of danger, of vulnerability, of jealousy, of withdrawal; we will lie to make an illusory relationship, a perfect one, without wounds.”
83. "Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live."
84. ”Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
85. "Man can never know the kind of lonliness 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."
86. "Man’s language is that displacement from the personal to the impersonal, but this is another form of self-deception. The self in them is disguised, it is not absent as they believe."
87. “Memory is a great betrayer.”
88. "Memory makes a tremendous voyage. But we never lose the child in us."
89. “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.”
90. “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.”
91. "My ideas usually come not at the desk writing but in the midst of living."
92. "My first vision of earth was water vieled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of the sea, and my eyes are the color of water."
93. "No life, no history, no human being, no event is without meaning. But it takes a certain training to penetrate the surface and we mistake superficiality for realism."
94. "No one can live with only a clinical, psychological, or historical vision of the world. there must be a capacity to recreate, renovate, renew."
95. “...one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers - you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. “
96. “Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy."
97. "Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person
sees."
98. "Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous."
99. “Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.”
100. "Our psychological reality, which lies below the surface, frightens us because it endlessly surprises us and drives us in a direction which societ's rules and organizations define as wrong or dangerous. When experiencing such fears, the conscious mind tries first of all to control the unconscious by repression. When it cannot be repressed, it rebels. When it rebels, it may lead either to madness or to life."
101. "People always blame external circumstances for their disintegration."
102. "Permit yourself to flow and overflow. Allow for the rise in temperature and all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess.”
103. "Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession."
104. “She wanted a fantastic destiny instead of a wise one ... endless voyages, the perpetually shifting ground of stage life, rather than security.”
105. "She wanted to be cruel, she understood how one could torture the loved one for the pleasure of consoling him."
106. "She was weeping over the end of a cycle. How one must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life and that leap the most difficult to make, to part with one's faith, one's love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion. The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelationship of emotions; the hunger for frontiers against which we might lean as upon closed doors before we proceed forward; the struggle against diffusion, new beginnings, against finality in acts without finality or end...."
107. "So I want to stress the importance of the wish. The real magical element is the wish, and if we don't know the wish then we stumble about and we accept entrapment because we don't really know what we are going towards."
108. "The act of writing resembles putting one's self in a dreamlike state. Improvisation in the novel may begin either with a theme, or one first line, as in a poem. The writing of a novel is, in a sense, directed, embroided upon a certain theme or thought or sensation. In maintaining the passageways between various states of consciousness, I became aware of the pull of the conscious casting it's nets into the unconscious to lift up it's treasures to the light. I am aware of that fragile passageway which becomes the vital conduit."
109. "The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others -- an admirable image."
110. "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."
111. "The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying."
112. “The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.”
113. “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.”
114. "The first steps towards freedom are defiant and awkward."
115. "The greatest suffering does not come from living, from mirages, from the unattainable dreams of Don Quixote, but from AWAKENING. There is no greater pain that awakening from a dream."
116. “Their destiny -- the railroad track of their obsessions.”
117. "The leaf fall of her words, the stained glass hues of her moods, the rust in her voice, the smoke in her mouth, her breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror."
118. "The important thing is to set the passions free."
119. “The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.”
120. "The more I explore neurosis the more I become aware that it is a modern form of romanticism. It stems from the same source, a hunger for perfection, an obsession with living out what one has imagined, and it is found to be illusory, a rejection of reality, the power to imagine and not to sustain one’s endurance, and then the creative force turned into destruction."
121. "The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart. There is an instrument called the quena made of human bones. It owes its origin to the worship of an Indian for his mistress. When she died he made a flute out of her bones. The quena has a more penetrating more haunting sound than the ordinary flute. Those who write know the process. I thought of it as I was spitting out my heart. Only I do not wait for my love to die."
122. “Then, with a calm smile, thinking no doubt of all the novels I have read, I took a large armchair and set it very close to my chair, and looking into the eyes of the one that my imagination placed there, I talked with him.
123. “The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”
124. "The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. there is always more mystery."
125. "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."
126. ”There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
127. “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.”
128. “The more I dreamed, the deeper grew my fever, until I suddenly realized I was dazzling myself with myself."
129. "The more I explore neurosis the more I become aware that it is a modern form of romanticism. It stems from the same source, a hunger for perfection, an obsession with living out what one has imagined, and it is found to be illusory, a rejection of reality, the power to imagine and not to sustain one’s endurance, and then the creative force turned into destruction."
130. "The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart. There is an instrument called the quena made of human bones. It owes its origin to the worship of an Indian for his mistress. When she died he made a flute out of her bones. The quena has a more penetrating more haunting sound than the ordinary flute. Those who write know the process. I thought of it as I was spitting out my heart. Only I do not wait for my love to die."
131. “The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. Albert Einstein 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."
132. “There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.”
133. “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.”
134. "There is no mockery between women. One lies down at peace as on one’s own breast."
135. “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.”
136. “There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning, and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.”
137. "There were no currents of thoughts, only the caress of flow and desire mingling, touching, travelling, withdrawing, wandering..."
138. ”The return to real life is always a shock, and sometimes it hurts.”
139. “The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”
140. "The secret of joy is the mastery of pain."
141. "The tragic aspect of love appears only when one tries to fit boundless love into a limited one."
142. "The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation."
143. "This High Place where I am writing is a blessing, a refuge, a tower
from which I can look down on my life without disturbance, a place of meditation, concentration, where I can gather anew my scattered strength and splintered control... Here, peace, solitude. My writings are all parading on the shelf. My typewriter is on the green garden table with blank paper and carbon paper.”
144. "This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men’s dreams.
145. “Those gentle gray eyes
When one is good.
Those eyes, so terrible,
When one deserves it.
Those eyes that pierce the night,
Following me when I run away,
Those dark eyes that pierce
My heart.
Those tempting eyes that
I sometimes run from
Because they are too sweet,
Alas, where can I hide?
If I do wrong, they are so angry!
If I do right, so good, so sweet
That my heart melts.
Those eyes, an illusion, perhaps,
They are the eyes of the conscience
Of my soul.”
146. “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, or a new country.”
147. "Too great an emphasis on technique arrests naturalness."
148. "Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning."
149. "Under cover of seduction, one avoids being controlled, influenced, possessed."
150. "Very little is created out of hatred."
151. “We are going to the moon, that is not very far, man has so much farther to go within himself.”
152. “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.
153. "We are never trapped unless we choose to be."
154. “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.”
155. “We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds."
156. "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
157. ”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.”
158. "We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us."
159. ”We write to heighten our own awareness of life.. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in tretrospection..We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it.to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth.”
160. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.”
161. "What happens if we don't have this very strong inward life is that external events just simply cause you to break down, to collapse."
162. “What I cannot love, I overlook.”
163. “What I consider my weaknesses are feminine traits: incapacity to destroy, ineffectualness in battle.”
164. "What was the mystery of women? Only this obstinacy in concealing themselves-merely this persistence in creating mysteries, as if the exposure of her thoughts and feelings were gifts reserved for love and intimacy."
165. "What we fear might happen, does happen."
166. "What you give isn't lost."
167. “When I was working on the diary I became aware of a wonderful image: relationships were very much like stellar constellations--friendships gravitated around the cities of my life. Paris, New York, Los Angeles.”
168. "When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow."
169. “When we walked the streets, bodies close together, arm in arm, hands locked, I was in such ecstasy I could not talk. The city disappeared, and so did the people. The acute joy of our walking together through the grey streets of Paris I shall never forget, and I shall never be able to describe it. We were walking above the world, above reality, into pure, pure ecstasy.”
170. “When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.”
171. “Who is the liar? Who the human being? Who is the cleverest? Who the strongest? Who is the least selfish? The most devoted? Or are all these elements mixed in each one of us?”
172. "Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her."
173. “Women, said [Otto] Rank, when cured of neurosis, enter life. Man enters art. Woman is too close to life, too human. The feminine quality is necessary to the male artist, but Rank questioned whether masculinity is equally necessary to the woman artist.
At this point, when I became a woman, I glowed with womanliness; I was expansive, relaxed, happy. Rank said, looking at me admiringly, "You look entirely different today." I felt as soft as a summer day, all bloom and scent, all joy of being.”
174. "Writing itself is often a waking dream."
175. "You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too."
176. "Your lies are not lies Sabina. They are arrows flung out of your orbit by the strength of your fantasy. To destroy reality. I will help you: it is I who will invent lies for you and with them we will traverse the world."
177. “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, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom...: absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death.”
178. "You should not give anybody the power to decide what is right and wrong in your creativity."
1. "Absurdity is the reaction of the intellect to events, it is not poetry or fantasy."
2. "Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age."
3. "A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked…"
4. “All elegant women have acquired a technique of weeping which has no . . . fatal effect on the make-up.”
5. "And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
6. "And when I speak of neurosis I really mean nothing more than what we used to call romanticism: that is, wanting the impossible and then being unhappy if it was found to be impossible."
7. "Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. 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."
8. "Art was the prescription for sanity and relief from the terrors and pains of human life."
9. "As children, we are made to fell we will only be loved if we are good (in the parent's terms). As soon as we begin to affirm our real selves, parents begin to reject us. We grow up with the idea that if we are ourselves we will be rejected. So, as artists, in our work e express our real self. But we keep the fear of not being loved for this real self. And timidity and shyness are the symptoms. A timidity we can overcome with those who understand and accept us. Now when I have to face the world with my real self expose in he writing, there is a crisis. Am I going to be accepted, approved, loved, or punished and rejected? Hence the fear."
10. “But I need a place where I can shout and weep. I have to be a Spanish savage at some time of the day. I record here the hysteria life causes in me. The overflow of an undisciplined extravagance. To hell with taste and art, with all contractions and polishings. Here I shout, I dance, I weep, I gnash my teeth, I go mad - all by myself, in bad English, in chaos. It will keep me sane for the world and for art.”
11. "But I think the greatest problem we have -- and I'm sure you have it too -- is the fear of someone reading over our shoulders, of someone passing judgment on our secret selves."
12. “...curious way that my idealism has been mixed with my fatalism, so that I can possess the soul of a dreamer and that of a cynic at the same time...”
13. "...depression can be more clearly understood as coming to those who are not willing to be depressed."
14. "Discovering other' weaknesses is not going to prove your strength. We all have weaknesses...The friend is the one how goes out to strengthen this weakness, but not to attack it."
15. “Do I feel my own self definite, encompassable? I know its boundary lines. There are experiences I shy away from. But my curiosity, creativeness, urge me beyond these bondaries, to transcend my character. My imagination pushes me into unknown, unexplored, dangerous realms. Yet there is always my fundamental nature, and I am never deceived by my "intellectual" adventures, or my literary exploits. I enlarge and expand my self; I do not like to be just one Anaïs, whole, familiar, contained. As soon as someone defines me. I do as June does; I seek escape from the confinements of definition.”
16. “Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.”
17. "Don't wait for it. Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you , then it comes to you."
18. “Dreams are necessary to life."
19. “Dreams have helped me to live.”
20. ”Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the action stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.”
21. “Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.”
22. "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."
23. “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.”
24. “Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensible as poetry.”
25. "Every difficult situation into which you are sometimes thrown has some kind of opening somewhere, even if it is only by way of the dream."
26. "Everyone is jealous. Some admit it, others do not. It is a perversity to be jealous of the past because the past is usually made of ashes."
27. “Finding one's self in a book is a second birth; and you are the only one who knows that at times men behave like women and women like men, and that all these distinctions are mock distinctions.”
28. "From all men I was different, and myself, but I see in you that part of me which is you."
29. “He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie.”
30. “He had a mania for washing and disinfecting Himself… For him the only danger came from the microbes that attacked the body. He had not studied the microbe of conscience which eats into the soul.”
31. “How beautiful the snow is!
Pure and white as an angel.
The children play in it,
and even babies stretch their arms
As a sign of welcome.
She should be happy in her white gown
which is real fur, although very cold.
It is pure and spotless
Except where people walk on it.”
32. “How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.”
33. "I always used art to put myself together again, and that is why I favored the artist, because I learned from him this creating out of nothing."
34. "I am enmeshed in my lies, and I want absolution. I cannot tell the truth because I have felt the heads of men in my womb. The truth would be death-dealing and I prefer fairytales. I am wrapped in lies which do not penetrate my soul. As if the lies I tell were like costumes."
35. "I am like a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough."
36. “I am not interested in fiction. I want faithfulness.”
37. “I don't understand it all. I had never been aware of that immense empty space that can only be filled by a Shadow that my mind has created, that my dreams have given a soul.
38. "I don't want to be a tourist in the world of images. I want to create something with them."
39. “If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way.”
40. “I feel a fatigue of the tongue seeking to utter impossible things until it twists itself into a knot and chokes me.”
41. "If enough people struggle against limitations of all kinds the world would be altered anyway, and changes made from the inside"
42. "If we could but make friends with our inner selves, come to terms with our own darkness, then there would be no trouble from without."
43. “If we could only write simultaneously all the levels on which we live, all at once. The whole truth!”
44. "If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation."
45. “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.”
46. "If you're negative, you're going to find causes for negativity."
47. "If you live passionately, you're bound to get into confused states."
48. "I go in to come out."
49. “I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.”
50. “I have the capacity to live several lives--one does not satisfy me."
51. “I like to feel that I have transcended my destiny.”
52. "I looked upon a clock to find the truth. The hours were passing like ivory chess figures, striking piano notes, and the minutes raced on wires mounted like tin soldiers. Hours like tall ebony women with gongs between their legs, tolling continuously so that I could not count them. I heard the rolling of my heart-beats; I heard the footsteps of my dreams, and the beat of time was lost among them like the face of truth."
53. "I mastered the mechanisms of life the better to bend it to the will of the dream."
54. "In chaos there is fertility."
55. “In my hours of profound discouragement I looked up to his strength and self-confidence. It is a curious example of the irony of fate to find that he does not possess these things. I, in my weakness, am the stronger of the two... Where shall this lead us? I who believed myself made to cling, thrown upon my own strength.”
56. "In order to change skins, evolve into new cycles, I feel one has to learn to discard."
57. "In the infinite there is no impasse."
58. "In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again."
59. "In wanting to protect ourselves, we often really entomb ourselves."
60. “I possess a power of magic ... [to] destroy the balance of a well-designed destiny -- with my diabolical mind.”
61. "I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing."
62. “Is devotion to others a cover for the hungers and the needs of the self, of which one is ashamed? I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.”
63. “I shiver when people boast of having been born in the same bed in which they hope they will die. The quest for fixed values seems to me a quest for immobility and stagnation.”
64. "I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me."
65. "It's a million times better to risk being deserted or betrayed than to withdraw into a fortress of alienation, shut the door and break the contact with others. Because then we really die. That is death. that is emotional death."
66. "It is only in such human relationships that one insists on one's own identity and separation from myths."
67. “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.”
68. "It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
69. "I took everything in, and the more you take in the more strength you find waiting to accomplish things and to expand your life."
70. “I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.”
71. “I want the firsthand knowledge of everything, not fiction, intimate experience only. . . . I don't care for films, newspapers, "reportages," the radio. I only want to be involved while it is being lived.”
72. "I want to dance and laugh. I want to dance. Nothing will shatter my individual world. No storm or sea on earth."
73. “I want to live only for ecstasy. Small doses, moderate loves, all half-shades, leave me cold. I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers.”
74. “I will never give myself entirely to anything...I will never escape from myself, neither through love, nor motherhood, nor art. My self is like the God of those of little faith, who see him everywhere, always, and cannot flee this obsession and this vision."
75. ”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.”
76. “I write emotional algebra.”
77. “Last night it was hot and I was leaning on the sill of the open window in the living room. Then my imagination got the better of me. A sinlge idea had taken possession of my dreams, a thing I had never, never thought of, an emptieness that I had never felt. I was alone and something was missing. It wasn't the love of my mother, my brothers or the rest of my family; I knew that I wanted someone very strong, very powerful, very handsome who would me and whom I could love with all my heart. It is an image or an idol that my dreams have created and that I am searching for in mortal form. Does he exist? And there, under the starry sky, the smiling moon, face to face with a horizon that doesn't go further than the end of the street, with my head in my hands, I sent a very sad prayer into infinite space: Love me, someone!
78. "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."
79. ”Life only became real when I wrote about it.”
80. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
81. "Life would be more bearable if I looked at it as an adventure and a tale"
82. “Like a parlor game in which questions are asked -- what is your favorite flower? Your favorite piece of music? My father was pacing up and down the long, red-tiled floor of the studio, firing questions at me: What about religion? What about politics? What are your ideas on morals? And so exultant because I answered them as he wished me to.
It is as if he had educated me. He says, "We do not need to lie to each other." Always the same wish, not to have to lie, but we will, of course, at the first sign of danger, of vulnerability, of jealousy, of withdrawal; we will lie to make an illusory relationship, a perfect one, without wounds.”
83. "Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live."
84. ”Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
85. "Man can never know the kind of lonliness 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."
86. "Man’s language is that displacement from the personal to the impersonal, but this is another form of self-deception. The self in them is disguised, it is not absent as they believe."
87. “Memory is a great betrayer.”
88. "Memory makes a tremendous voyage. But we never lose the child in us."
89. “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.”
90. “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.”
91. "My ideas usually come not at the desk writing but in the midst of living."
92. "My first vision of earth was water vieled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of the sea, and my eyes are the color of water."
93. "No life, no history, no human being, no event is without meaning. But it takes a certain training to penetrate the surface and we mistake superficiality for realism."
94. "No one can live with only a clinical, psychological, or historical vision of the world. there must be a capacity to recreate, renovate, renew."
95. “...one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers - you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. “
96. “Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy."
97. "Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person
sees."
98. "Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous."
99. “Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.”
100. "Our psychological reality, which lies below the surface, frightens us because it endlessly surprises us and drives us in a direction which societ's rules and organizations define as wrong or dangerous. When experiencing such fears, the conscious mind tries first of all to control the unconscious by repression. When it cannot be repressed, it rebels. When it rebels, it may lead either to madness or to life."
101. "People always blame external circumstances for their disintegration."
102. "Permit yourself to flow and overflow. Allow for the rise in temperature and all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess.”
103. "Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession."
104. “She wanted a fantastic destiny instead of a wise one ... endless voyages, the perpetually shifting ground of stage life, rather than security.”
105. "She wanted to be cruel, she understood how one could torture the loved one for the pleasure of consoling him."
106. "She was weeping over the end of a cycle. How one must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life and that leap the most difficult to make, to part with one's faith, one's love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion. The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelationship of emotions; the hunger for frontiers against which we might lean as upon closed doors before we proceed forward; the struggle against diffusion, new beginnings, against finality in acts without finality or end...."
107. "So I want to stress the importance of the wish. The real magical element is the wish, and if we don't know the wish then we stumble about and we accept entrapment because we don't really know what we are going towards."
108. "The act of writing resembles putting one's self in a dreamlike state. Improvisation in the novel may begin either with a theme, or one first line, as in a poem. The writing of a novel is, in a sense, directed, embroided upon a certain theme or thought or sensation. In maintaining the passageways between various states of consciousness, I became aware of the pull of the conscious casting it's nets into the unconscious to lift up it's treasures to the light. I am aware of that fragile passageway which becomes the vital conduit."
109. "The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others -- an admirable image."
110. "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."
111. "The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying."
112. “The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.”
113. “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.”
114. "The first steps towards freedom are defiant and awkward."
115. "The greatest suffering does not come from living, from mirages, from the unattainable dreams of Don Quixote, but from AWAKENING. There is no greater pain that awakening from a dream."
116. “Their destiny -- the railroad track of their obsessions.”
117. "The leaf fall of her words, the stained glass hues of her moods, the rust in her voice, the smoke in her mouth, her breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror."
118. "The important thing is to set the passions free."
119. “The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.”
120. "The more I explore neurosis the more I become aware that it is a modern form of romanticism. It stems from the same source, a hunger for perfection, an obsession with living out what one has imagined, and it is found to be illusory, a rejection of reality, the power to imagine and not to sustain one’s endurance, and then the creative force turned into destruction."
121. "The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart. There is an instrument called the quena made of human bones. It owes its origin to the worship of an Indian for his mistress. When she died he made a flute out of her bones. The quena has a more penetrating more haunting sound than the ordinary flute. Those who write know the process. I thought of it as I was spitting out my heart. Only I do not wait for my love to die."
122. “Then, with a calm smile, thinking no doubt of all the novels I have read, I took a large armchair and set it very close to my chair, and looking into the eyes of the one that my imagination placed there, I talked with him.
123. “The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”
124. "The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. there is always more mystery."
125. "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."
126. ”There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
127. “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.”
128. “The more I dreamed, the deeper grew my fever, until I suddenly realized I was dazzling myself with myself."
129. "The more I explore neurosis the more I become aware that it is a modern form of romanticism. It stems from the same source, a hunger for perfection, an obsession with living out what one has imagined, and it is found to be illusory, a rejection of reality, the power to imagine and not to sustain one’s endurance, and then the creative force turned into destruction."
130. "The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart. There is an instrument called the quena made of human bones. It owes its origin to the worship of an Indian for his mistress. When she died he made a flute out of her bones. The quena has a more penetrating more haunting sound than the ordinary flute. Those who write know the process. I thought of it as I was spitting out my heart. Only I do not wait for my love to die."
131. “The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. Albert Einstein 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."
132. “There are only two kinds of freedom in the world; the freedom of the rich and powerful, and the freedom of the artist and the monk who renounces possessions.”
133. “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.”
134. "There is no mockery between women. One lies down at peace as on one’s own breast."
135. “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.”
136. “There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning, and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.”
137. "There were no currents of thoughts, only the caress of flow and desire mingling, touching, travelling, withdrawing, wandering..."
138. ”The return to real life is always a shock, and sometimes it hurts.”
139. “The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”
140. "The secret of joy is the mastery of pain."
141. "The tragic aspect of love appears only when one tries to fit boundless love into a limited one."
142. "The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation."
143. "This High Place where I am writing is a blessing, a refuge, a tower
from which I can look down on my life without disturbance, a place of meditation, concentration, where I can gather anew my scattered strength and splintered control... Here, peace, solitude. My writings are all parading on the shelf. My typewriter is on the green garden table with blank paper and carbon paper.”
144. "This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men’s dreams.
145. “Those gentle gray eyes
When one is good.
Those eyes, so terrible,
When one deserves it.
Those eyes that pierce the night,
Following me when I run away,
Those dark eyes that pierce
My heart.
Those tempting eyes that
I sometimes run from
Because they are too sweet,
Alas, where can I hide?
If I do wrong, they are so angry!
If I do right, so good, so sweet
That my heart melts.
Those eyes, an illusion, perhaps,
They are the eyes of the conscience
Of my soul.”
146. “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, or a new country.”
147. "Too great an emphasis on technique arrests naturalness."
148. "Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning."
149. "Under cover of seduction, one avoids being controlled, influenced, possessed."
150. "Very little is created out of hatred."
151. “We are going to the moon, that is not very far, man has so much farther to go within himself.”
152. “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.
153. "We are never trapped unless we choose to be."
154. “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.”
155. “We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds."
156. "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
157. ”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.”
158. "We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us."
159. ”We write to heighten our own awareness of life.. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in tretrospection..We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it.to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth.”
160. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.”
161. "What happens if we don't have this very strong inward life is that external events just simply cause you to break down, to collapse."
162. “What I cannot love, I overlook.”
163. “What I consider my weaknesses are feminine traits: incapacity to destroy, ineffectualness in battle.”
164. "What was the mystery of women? Only this obstinacy in concealing themselves-merely this persistence in creating mysteries, as if the exposure of her thoughts and feelings were gifts reserved for love and intimacy."
165. "What we fear might happen, does happen."
166. "What you give isn't lost."
167. “When I was working on the diary I became aware of a wonderful image: relationships were very much like stellar constellations--friendships gravitated around the cities of my life. Paris, New York, Los Angeles.”
168. "When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow."
169. “When we walked the streets, bodies close together, arm in arm, hands locked, I was in such ecstasy I could not talk. The city disappeared, and so did the people. The acute joy of our walking together through the grey streets of Paris I shall never forget, and I shall never be able to describe it. We were walking above the world, above reality, into pure, pure ecstasy.”
170. “When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.”
171. “Who is the liar? Who the human being? Who is the cleverest? Who the strongest? Who is the least selfish? The most devoted? Or are all these elements mixed in each one of us?”
172. "Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her."
173. “Women, said [Otto] Rank, when cured of neurosis, enter life. Man enters art. Woman is too close to life, too human. The feminine quality is necessary to the male artist, but Rank questioned whether masculinity is equally necessary to the woman artist.
At this point, when I became a woman, I glowed with womanliness; I was expansive, relaxed, happy. Rank said, looking at me admiringly, "You look entirely different today." I felt as soft as a summer day, all bloom and scent, all joy of being.”
174. "Writing itself is often a waking dream."
175. "You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too."
176. "Your lies are not lies Sabina. They are arrows flung out of your orbit by the strength of your fantasy. To destroy reality. I will help you: it is I who will invent lies for you and with them we will traverse the world."
177. “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, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom...: absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death.”
178. "You should not give anybody the power to decide what is right and wrong in your creativity."