Thadeus Frei > Thadeus's Quotes

“Talk—half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman—like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again.”
― Anaïs Nin, House of Incest

“Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it, to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: "I don't understand”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“It is hard for me to believe in continuous, sustained happiness, just as it is hard for me to believe in love.”
― Anaïs Nin, Fire: From A Journal of Love - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“They had reached a perfect moment of human love. They had created a moment of perfect understanding and accord. This highest moment would now remain as point of comparison to torment them later on when all natural imperfections would disintegrate it.”
― Anaïs Nin

“In each studio there is a human being dressed in the full regalia of his myth fearing to expore a vulnerable opening, spreading not his charms but his defences, plotting to disrobe, somewhere along the night-- his body without the aperture of the heart or his heart with a door closed to his body. thus keeping one compartment for refuge, one uninvaded cell.”
― Anaïs Nin, Ladders to Fire

“I am quite wiling to confide entirely in human being, except that at some moment or another human beings get preoccupied, moody, busy, inattentive, and there come an end to the interest, and this never happens in a journal!”
― Anaïs Nin

“Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. But I am more preoccupied with loving.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“Love reduces the complexity of living. It amazes me that when Henry walks towards the cafe table where I wait for him, or opens the gate to our house, the sight of him is sufficient to exult me. No letter from anyone, even in praise of my book, can stir me as much as a note from him.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“I get furious at stairways, furious at doors, at
walls, furious at everyday life which interferes with the continuity of
ecstasy.”
― Anaïs Nin, House of Incest

“Since that talk with Henry, when I admitted more than I had ever admitted to myself, my life has altered and become deformed. The restlessness which was vague and nameless has become intolerably clear. Here is where it stabs me, at the center of the most perfect, the most steadfast structure, marriage. When this shakes, then my whole life crumbles. My love for Hugo has become fraternal. I look almost with horror at this change, which is not sudden, but slow in appearing on the surface. I had closed my eyes to all the signs. Above all, I dreaded admitting that I didn't want Hugo's passion. I had counted on the ease with which I would distribute my body. But it is not true. It was never true. When I rushed towards Henry, it was all Henry. I am frightened because I have realized the full extent of my imprisonment. Hugo has sequestered me, fostered my love of solitude. I regret now all those years when he gave me nothing but his love and I turned into myself for the rest. Starved, dangerous years.
I should break up my whole life, and I cannot do it. My life is not as important as Hugo's, and Henry doesn't need me because he has June. But whatever in me has grown outside and beyond Hugo will go on.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“Am I creating my own isolation? It seems to me that most of my acts are acts of integrity. So much takes place within me each day that by comparison I find a paucity, a stinginess, a silence in people which drives me to excess.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 5: 1947-1955

“There are things one reads that make you aware that you have lived nothing, felt nothing, experienced nothing up to that time. How can i begin to feel - to feel? I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me.”
― Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

“I want to make the feminine scar. Helen of Troy was, after all, unfecundable. She was one of the rigid ones, like [Virginia] Woolf and [Rebecca] West.”
― Anaïs Nin, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anais Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953

“I am very near to madness. I imagine my isolation, and I go mad inside, a delirium of doubts and fears.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.”
― John Greenleaf Whittier

“...the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment..”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“I felt myself still reliving a past which was no longer anything more than the history of another person;”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“Once we have reached a certain degree of enfeeblement, whether caused by age or by ill health, all pleasure taken at the expense of sleep, every disturbance of routine, becomes a nuisance.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“He sat there silent, watching their love expire.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Complete Masterpiece

“I longed for nothing more than to behold a stormy sea, less as a mighty spectacle than as a momentary revelation of the true life of nature;”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Complete Masterpiece

“We fall in love for a smile, a glance, a bare shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope or sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character. And when later on we see much of the beloved person, we can no longer, whatever the cruel reality that confronts us, strip off that good character, that nature of a woman who loves us, from the person who bestows that glance, bares that shoulder, than we can when she has grown old eliminate her youthful face from a person whom we have known since her girlhood.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“An artist has no need to express his mind directly in his work for it to express the quality of that mind; it has indeed been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist, who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“Dreams are not to be converted into reality, that we know; we would not form any, perhaps, were it not for desire, and it is useful to us to form them in order to see them fail and to be instructed by their failure.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“What we feel is the only thing that exists for us, and we project it into the past, into the future, without letting ourselves be stopped by the fictitious barriers of death.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“The truth was, though as yet it was hardly apparent, that she was highly intelligent, and that in the things that she said the stupidity was not her own but that of her environment and age”
― Marcel Proust, In Search Of Lost Time (All 7 Volumes)

“For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’m going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book:”
― Marcel Proust, In Search Of Lost Time (All 7 Volumes)

“Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]

“It was evident to me then that I existed in the same manner as all other men, that I must grow old, that I must die like them, and that among them I was to be distinguished merely as one of those who have no aptitude for writing. And so, utterly despondent, I renounced literature for ever,”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“he loved sincerity, but only as he might love a pimp who could keep him in touch with the daily life of his mistress.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Complete Masterpiece