amélie

“Wenn du mich einmal nicht mehr magst, Und geht mein Herz in Scherben -
Daß du nicht fragst, noch um mich klagst! Ich kann so leise sterben.”
― Mascha Kaléko, In meinen Träumen läutet es Sturm

“I watched myself live, Iris, like a movie, and that image of myself is everything. I don't want to betray it. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm telling you that what I can't bear is the ordinary. I don't want to bore myself, to sink into pedestrian ways of other people - heart-to-heart talks, petty confessions, relationships of habit, not passion. I see those people all around me, and I detest them, so I have to be divorced from myself in order to keep from sliding into a life I find nauseating. It's a matter of appearances, but surfaces are underestimated. The veneer becomes the thing. I rarely distinguish the man in the movie from the spectator anymore.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blindfold

“I gave away my mystery, knowing I shouldn't, yet incapable of anything else.”
― Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“The dawn! The dawn, I repeated. Henry thought it was the dawn itself which was a new experience. I could not explain what I felt. It was the first time I had not felt the compulsion to escape; it was the first time I had abandoned myself to fraternity, exchange, confessions, without feeling suddenly the need to take flight. All night I had stayed there, without experiencing that abrupt end to fusion, that sudden and painful consciousness of separation, of reaching ultimately and always the need of my own world, the inability to remain outside, estranged, at some moment or other, from everyone. This had not happened, this dawn had come as the first break in the compulsion and tyranny of inadaptation. (The way I once concealed from myself this drama of perpetual divorce was to blame the clock. It was time to go, in place of now I must go, because relationship is so difficult for me, so strained, so laborious, its continuance, its flow.) I never knew what happened. At a party, at a visit, at a play, a film, came a moment of anguish. I cannot sustain the role, the pretense that I am at one with others, synchronized. Where was the exit? Flight. The imperative need of flight. Was it the failure to remove the obstacles, the walls, the barriers, the effort? Dawn had come quietly, and found me sitting at ease with Henry and Fred, and it was the dawn of freedom from a nameless enemy.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934