Quotes About Living

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, & you believe you are living.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

I never lose sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled.

The living out in excess kills the imagination and the intensity

I was growing sad, sad with restlessness and hunger. I felt that nothing would happen to me. I felt desperate with desire to be a woman, to plunge into living. Why was I enslaved by this need of being in love first? Where would my life begin? It seemed to me that a great current was passing all around me and that I was left out. I would have to find someone who felt as I did. But where? Where?

I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.

Perhaps, said the Doctor pensively. It may also be that you Americans are work-cultists, and work is the structure that holds you up, not the joy of pure living.

He observed confusion and chaos, which I call living by one's emotions instead of one's mind.

I have decided that if analysis is a hothouse, a hastening of wisdom and growth, nevertheless the life experience must be actually lived out and through, completely, in spite of it; everything that is lived out in the imagination is poison.

Why did I feel warmed by imperfections, discomfort, and patina? Because intense living leaves scars, and I could not find such scars anywhere in America. Inner scars, softened, human wear and tear.

It is impossible to make my portrait because of my mobility. I am not photogenic because of my mobility. Peace, serenity, and integration are unknown to me. My familiar climate is anxiety. I write as I breathe, naturally, flowingly, spontaneously, out of an overflow, not as a substitute for life. I am more interested in human beings than in writing, more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living than in writing.

And what a joy again when, in the center of the madness, you say unexpectedly something very deep, the sudden illuminations of living, the lantern never quite blown out—I love that too.

I do not hold on now. I live openly, ready for the pain, the separations and losses. I am not holding on. Open and free, sad at moments, but knowing the deep joys are worth all that follows. Deep joys. One must be willing to suffer, to surrender.

She is so busy just BEING, talking, walking, making love, drinking, that she can achieve nothing else.

I share with Henry an anger not at the imperfection of women, but at the foulness of living itself.

Djuna, you're taking me to the bottom of the sea to live, like a real mermaid. I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. But you, poor Rango, you're from the mountain, water is not your element. You won't be happy. Men from the mountains always dream of the sea, and above all things I love to travel. Where are we sailing now? - Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart

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.

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

All trips end eventually. Is that any reason to renounce undertaking one and enjoying it? You only live once. Is that any reason to spoil the single life you do have?

Viver no presente, como diziam os estóicos, como dizem todos os sábios, não é um sonho, não é um ideal, não é uma utopia: é a simplíssima e dificílima verdade de viver. A eternidade? Se ela é ''um perpétuo hoje'', como queria Santo Agostinho, é inútil esperá-la amanhã.

La vie est trop courte pour qu'on puisse entreprendre de la penser avant de la vivre. C'est

We should enjoy this summer, flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one we'll see.

I like life well enough to want to live it awake

I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live - contented themselves with appearing to live, and were on the verge of considering life merely as a vexatious hindrance to writing.