The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
Anais NinRead
Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.
Interpretation
Eroticism serves as a vital avenue for personal discovery, much like poetry.
In this quote, Anais Nin suggests that exploring eroticism is essential for understanding oneself, paralleling the insights gained from poetry. By engaging with our erotic nature, we uncover deeper truths about our desires, emotions, and identities, ultimately enriching our self-knowledge.
In practice
During a workshop on self-discovery, one might quote Anais Nin to emphasize the importance of understanding our desires.
The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
Anxiety is love's greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning.
We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing aggression in human beings. And when one sees in psychoanalysis hostility disappearing as people conquer their fears, one wonders if the cure is not there.
The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.
We have been poisoned by fairy tales.
But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted.
And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.
Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.
Love can be angry... with a kind of anger in which there is no gall, like the dove's and not the ravens.
All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things.
To state the obvious, romantic comedies have to be funny and they have to be romantic. But one of the most important things, for me anyway, is that they be about two strong people finding their way to love.
I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump.
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