The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
Anais NinRead
What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.
Interpretation
This quote expresses a deep desire to cherish and preserve happiness in one's life.
Anais Nin's quote reflects an intense yearning to both embrace and safeguard happiness. The imagery of kneeling beneath falling happiness like rain suggests a profound appreciation for joyful moments, while the desire to gather and preserve it with lace and silk symbolizes the fragility of joy and the effort one takes to hold onto it amidst life's unpredictability.
In practice
In a speech about mental health, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of valuing and protecting happiness.
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.
Instead of looking for the success in your life, look for the thing that is going to bring you the greatest joy.
Do not forget that even as "to work is to worship" so to be cheery is to worship also, and to be happy is the first step to being pious.
If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
In order to be truly happy, you must live along with, and you must stand for something larger than yourself.
"You look how you look," "Be comfortable. What are you going to do? Be hungry every single day to make other people happy? That's just dumb."
The happiness of one's own heart alone cannot satisfy the soul; one must try to include, as necessary to one's own happiness, the happiness of others.
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