The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
Anais NinRead
I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a preference for the warmth and emotional depth of simplicity over the superficiality of brilliance.
Anais Nin contrasts the beauty of precious diamonds with that of simple field flowers, suggesting that true value lies in warmth, love, and emotional connection rather than mere external brilliance or materialistic attributes. She highlights how some people, like diamonds, may seem valuable but lack life and affection, while others, embodying the qualities of flowers, are full of love and beauty in their modesty.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of emotional intelligence in relationships.
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.
Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
Smiles from reason flow, To brute deny'd, and are of love the food.
Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.
I've found what I was looking for, Child: what people call love between a man and a woman is a season. And if, at its flowering, this season is a feast of greenery, at its waning, it's only a heap of rotting leaves.
There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may.
And then we were kissing.....The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I rally like my body; this cancer-ruined thing I'd spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle.
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