"After midnight the moon set and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flight to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the aesthetic appeal of flying."
"The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward."
"In my life I had come to realize that when things were going very well indeed it was just the time to anticipate trouble. And, conversely, I learned from pleasant experience that at the most despairing crisis, when all looked sour beyond words, some delightful "break" was apt to lurk just around the corner."
And finally, words to match her distilled essence: "Adventure is worthwhile in itself."
On courage:
“I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life -- and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”
“To create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage.”
“You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.”
On women:
“I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.”
On art:
“Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time - we haven't time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time”
“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.”
“I said to myself -- I'll paint what I see -- what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it -- I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”
On sun-bleached bones:
“Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished.”
"Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsessions. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.
You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood.
If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faxes, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music dancing, opium, wine.
How much do you lose by the periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of distinct and never-repeated wonders?"
- from Volume III of The Diary of Anais Nin
"And to tell you the truth, I cannot help being glad (though, to be sure, it was an uncommonly naughty thing for her to do), but I cannot help being glad that our foolish Pandora peeped into the box. No doubt - no doubt - the Troubles are still flying around the world, and have increased in multitude, rather than lessened, and are a very ugly set of imps, and carry most venous stings in their tails. I have felt them already, and expect to feel them more, as I grow older. But then that lovely and lightsome little figure of Hope! What in the world would we do without her? Hope spiritualizes the earth; Hope makes it always new; and, even in the earth's best and brighteset aspect, Hope shows it to be only the shadow of an infinite bliss hereafter!"
"After mother and daughter were reunited, Demeter restored fertility and growth to the earth. She then provided the Eleusinian Mysteries. These were awesome religious ceremonies that initiates were forbidden to reveal. Through the mysteries, people gained a reason to live in joy and die without fearing death."
- Goddesses In Everywoman, by Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D.
What Will You Say?
What will you say, hermetic soul? Resigned,
Benighted heart, what can you say tonight
To one so loved, so lovely and so kind,
Whose gift of grace has brought you back to light?
- Our pride shall be to sing her holy name
Whose gentleness displays such peerless powers;
Her sacred flesh, still innocent of shame,
Can still bestow new innocence on ours.
Sometimes at night, inside my solitude,
Or in the street, surrounded by the crowd,
Her spirit beckons like a flame in the air,
Saying: Beauty I am and I decree
That for my sake you seek me everywhere,
And have no other goddesses but me.
"41. Rainbow - Things may look black for a time, and one or two little worries will crop up. But you've no need to be anxious. The rainbow brings a promise that all will be well."
A few hours later, for the second time this week, a rainbow shone down from the sky - on me. Fancy that.
You see what you are thinking and feeling, seldom what you are looking at."
- Shiqin via the incomparable Whiskey River - http://whiskeyriver.blogspot.com
p.s. Remember, the oyster has to cradle a bit of grit in order to end up with a pearl.
- From Breaking Open The Head by the brilliant Daniel Pinchbeck
