Seduction of the Minotaur Quotes

“We may seem to forget a person, a place, a state of being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is selecting new actors, seeking the closest reproduction to the friend, the lover, the husband we are trying to forget, in order to re-enact the drama with understudies. And one day we open our eyes and there we are, repeating the same story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is internal. It is what the old mystics described as karma, repeated until the spiritual or emotional experience was understood, liquidated, achieved.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“Lillian was reminded of the Talmudic words: "We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“Archaeologists of the soul never return empty-handed.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur

“Whereas by desiring someone who would not desire her, she could allow this fire to burn and feel: how alive I am! I am capable of desire.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“A long time ago," said Michael, "I decided never to fall in love again. I have made of desire an anonymous activity." "But not to feel...not to love...is like dying within life, Michael.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“Such obsession with reaching the moon, because they had failed to reach each other, each a solitary planet! In silence, in mystery, a human being was formed, was exploded, was struck by other passing bodies, was burned, was deserted. And then it was born in the molten love of the one who cared.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur

“Djuna concerned only with the longitude, and latitude and altitude of human beings in relation to each other.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur

“For the first time, in Golconda, she had practiced Larry's choice of withdrawing if the people were not of quality. Of preferring solitude to the effort of pretending he was interested in them.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“Perhaps," said the Doctor pensively. "It may also be that you Americans are work-cultists, and work is the structure that holds you up, not the joy of pure living.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“Golconda remained a city where the wind was like velvet, where the sun was made of radium, and the sea as warm as a mother's womb.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“Each one of us possesses in himself a separate and distinct city, a unique city, as we possess different aspects of the same person.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“You had to account for every move, arrival or exit. In the world there was a conspiracy against improvisation. It was only permitted in jazz.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“Now the evening is beginning and I will discover a human being to court or to be courted by, an adventure with caprice and desire, and while gambling I might find love.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“What makes some butterflies have such beautiful colors on their wings, and others not?" "The plain ones were born of parents who didn't know how to paint.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“We give to others only peripheral improvisations. The plots, and themes of the music, like the plots and themes of our life, never alchemized into words, existed only in a state of music, stirring or numbing, exalting or despairing, but never named.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“The skins matched all the tones of chocolate, coffee and wood. There were many white suits and dresses, and many of those flowered dresses which in the realm of printed dresses stand in the same relation as the old paintings of flowers and fruit done by maiden aunts to a Matisse, or a Braque.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur

“Was it not an act of love to impersonate the loved one?”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“safe there from inquiry and exposure? But in this jungle, a pair of eyes, not her own, had followed and found her. Her mother's eyes. She had first seen the world through her mother's eyes, and seen herself through her mother's eyes. Children were like kittens, at first they did not have vision, they did not see themselves except reflected in the eyes of the parents.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“A couple was leaning over the railing, and Lillian could hear the woman say: "Even if you don't mean it, just for tonight, say you love me. I won't ever remind you of it; I will not see you again, but just for tonight say you love me, say you love me.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“more damaging was his conviction that we live by a series of repetitions until the experience is solved, understood, liquidated...”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“All adventurers came to grief." Perhaps they had not been able to make the transition, to alchemize the life of the mind into the life of the senses. They died when their minds were overpowered by nature, yet they did not hesitate to dilute it in alcohol.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“The white man had invented glasses which made objects too near or too far, cameras, telescopes, spyglasses, objects which put glass between living and vision. It was the image he sought to possess, not the texture, the living warmth, the human closeness.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“Fred was afraid of the night, afraid his body would slip away from him, dissolve in that purple velvet with diamond eyes, the tropical night. The tropical night did not lie inert, like a painted movie backdrop, but was filled with whisperings, and seemed to have arms like the foliage.
Beauty was a drug. The small beach shone like mercury at their feet.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur

“I can see, I can see that it is in this distorted vision of the world's proper proportions that lies the secret of our fears. We make the animals bigger with our fears. We make our creations and our loves smaller, we shrink by our vision, and enlarge and shrink according to the whims of our interchangeable vision, not according to an immutable law of growth. The size of each world we live in is individual and relative, and the objects and people vary in each EYE.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“Strings of chili hung from the rafters, chili to wake them from their dreams, dreams born of scents and rhythms, and the warmth that fell from the sky like the fleeciest blanket.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“Lillian's recurrent dream of a ship that could not reach the water, that sailed laboriously, pushed by her with great effort, through city streets, had determined her course toward the sea, as if she would give this ship, once and for all, its proper sea bed.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur: The Authoritative Edition

“Pretend to be a boy, when what she most wanted was to be loved by one.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur

“She had the feeling that she was eating the dawn.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur

“She felt an unconfessed need of receiving from some gentle source the reassurance that the world was gentle and warm, and not, as it may have seemed during the day, cold and cruel.”
― Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur