Xinlin

“We'll burn them" he said
"Burn them all" she said with bitterness.
To her this was not only an offering of peace to his tormenting jealousy, but a sudden anger at this pile of books whose contents had not prepared her for moments such as this one. All these novels so carefully concealing the truth about character, about the obscurities, the tangles, the mysteries. Words words words words and no revelation on the pitfalls, the abysms in which human beings found themselves.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four Chambered Heart 1959. Swallow Press

“The house in which she had lived as a child was the house of the spirit which does not live blindly but is ever, out of passionate experience, building and adorning its four-chambered heart - an extension and expansion of the body”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“He could not maintain the effort to arrive on time since his lifelong habit had created the opposite habit: to elude, to avoid, to disappoint every expectation of others, every commitment, every promise, every crystallization. The magic beauty of simultaneity, to see the loved one rushing toward you at the same moment you are rushing toward him, the magic power of meeting exactly at midnight to achieve union, the illusion of one common rhythm achieved by overcoming obstacles, deserting friends, breaking other bonds —all this was soon dissolved by his laziness, by his habit of missing every moment, of never keeping his word, of living perversely in a state of chaos, of swimming more naturally in a sea of failed intentions, broken promises, and aborted wishes. The importance of rhythm in Djuna was so strong that no matter where she was, even without a watch, she sensed the approach of midnight and would climb on a bus, so instinctively and accurate that very often as she stepped of the bus the twelve loud gongs of midnight would be striking at the large station clock. This obedience to timing was her awareness of the rarity of unity between human beings.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel

“We think we long for eternal life, but maybe what we’re really longing for is perfect and unconditional love; a world in which lions actually do lay down with lambs; a world free of famines and floods, concentration camps and Gulag archipelagos; a world in which we grow up to love others in the same helplessly exuberant way we once loved our parents; a world in which we’re forever adored like a precious baby; a world built on an entirely different logic from our own, one in which life needn’t eat life in order to survive.”
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole