Like the Baron, Mathilde developed a formula for acting out life as a series of roles—that is, by saying to herself in the morning while brushing her blond hair, "Today I want to become this or that person," and then proceeding to be that person.
One day she decided she would like to be an elegant representative of a well-known Parisian modiste and go to Peru. All she had to do was to act the role. So she dressed with care, presented herself with extraordinary assurance at the house of the modiste, was engaged to be her representative and given a boat ticket to Lima.
Aboard ship, she behaved like a French missionary of elegance. Her innate talent for recognizing good wines, good perfumes, good dressmaking, marked her as a lady of refinement.


Anaïs Nin

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At five o'clock Paris always has a current of eroticism in the air.
ANAïS NIN
How well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, inclu...
ANAïS NIN
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.
ANAïS NIN
And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to b...
ANAïS NIN
I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark though the witches are all hung, ...
ANAïS NIN
I walked into my own book, seeking peace.
It was night, and I made a careless movement inside t...
ANAïS NIN
There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.
ANAïS NIN
There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
ANAïS NIN
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then do...
ANAïS NIN
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
ANAïS NIN
The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest.
ANAïS NIN
My attraction to drugs is based on an immense desire to annihilate awareness.
ANAïS NIN
She is suspicious of words. She lives by her senses, by her intuition. We don’t have a language fo...
ANAïS NIN
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
ANAïS NIN
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
ANAïS NIN
I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.
ANAïS NIN
I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the botto...
ANAïS NIN
When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.
ANAïS NIN
Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. Ther...
ANAïS NIN
People living deeply have no fear of death.
ANAïS NIN
From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to...
ANAïS NIN
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is t...
ANAïS NIN
The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.
ANAïS NIN
She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in t...
ANAïS NIN
For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to ...
ANAïS NIN
The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or a woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.
ANAïS NIN
When I first met him, he did not care if a friend did not fit into his world, because at that time h...
ANAïS NIN
You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence...
ANAïS NIN
Also, I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their m...
ANAïS NIN
A man fell in love with Jeanne, and she tried to love him. But she complained that he uttered such o...
ANAïS NIN
I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a foo...
ANAïS NIN
You cannot do any more for me," I said. "Since I have begun to depend on you I feel weaker than ever...
ANAïS NIN
In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of p...
ANAïS NIN
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are
ANAïS NIN
Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are...
ANAïS NIN
I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emp...
ANAïS NIN
I want to do things so wild with you that I don't know how to say them.
ANAïS NIN
Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.
ANAïS NIN
[Y]ou have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The ful...
ANAïS NIN
Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.
ANAïS NIN
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
ANAïS NIN
I write emotional algebra.
ANAïS NIN
She was truthful, or I was the greatest dupe who ever existed. I can only believe in our ecstasy. I ...
ANAïS NIN
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
ANAIS NIN
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that ...
ANAIS NIN
How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it...
ANAIS NIN
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds o...
ANAIS NIN
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
ANAIS NIN
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
ANAIS NIN
There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.
ANAIS NIN
What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?
ANAIS NIN
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
ANAIS NIN
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
ANAIS NIN
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
ANAIS NIN
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It d...
ANAIS NIN