I’m a continuous seeker of words—but not any kind of words.
I look only for those words that speak directly to my soul and make my heart skip a beat.
The kind of words that make me dream, the ones that have answers to my unasked questions, the ones that turn on the light in my darkness and heal the brokenness inside.
Words that give me courage. Words that make me feel everything I need to feel.
I seek that mixture of words that once combined together by another human become a universal message, carrying some sort of magic inside, and transcending age, gender, time, countries, and states of minds and hearts.
So I take each and every one of these words in a long embrace, becoming one with every letter, every quote, every author.
Today, in my state of mind and heart, sits Anaïs Nin and some of her words that I dearly love:
“It’s alright for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.”
“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
“Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.”
“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”
“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
“Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning or your soul—you create suffering.”
“If you limit yourself only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.”
“When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.”
“Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”
“My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.”
“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
“I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.”
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
“Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.”
“We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art―we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.”
“I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.”
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
“Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.”
“No man and woman know what will be born in the darkness of their intermingling; so much besides children, so many invisible births, exchanges of soul and character, blossoming of unknown selves, liberation of hidden treasures, buried fantasies…”
“How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.”
“You don’t find love, it finds you. It’s got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what’s written in the stars.”
“Do not seek the because—in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
“Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.”
“You cannot save people. You can only love them.”
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
“I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.”
“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.”
“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”
“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”
I hope you have enjoyed the quotes above and perhaps found a little bit of light in some of them.
~
AUTHOR: SIMONA ANCA MARIA TOMA
IMAGE: MARIA ORLOVA/PEXELS
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