“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.”

—  Anaïs Nin

Winter, 1931-1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for th…" by Anaïs Nin?
Anaïs Nin photo
Anaïs Nin 278
writer of novels, short stories, and erotica 1903–1977

Related quotes

Anaïs Nin photo

“I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Winter, 1931-1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Context: Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

“Ordinary life does not interest me.”

Ralph Smart
Kenneth N. Waltz photo

“Each man does seek his own interest, but, unfortunately, not according to the dictates of reason.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter II, The First Image, p. 23

H.P. Lovecraft photo

“I am only about half alive—a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored & listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me. However—so many things do interest me, & interest me intensely, in science, history, philosophy, & literature; that I have never actually desired to die, or entertained any suicidal designs, as might be expected of one with so little kinship to the ordinary features of life.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Alfred Galpin (27 May 1918), published in Letters to Alfred Galpin edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 18
Non-Fiction, Letters

David Levithan photo

“I couldn't remember ordinary moments, only the ones that had made an impression. Ordinary moments were the ones that fell away first.”

David Levithan book Every You, Every Me

Source: Every You, Every Me

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo

“A deepened, high-energy democracy does not seek to replace the real world of interests and of interest-bearing individuals with the selfless citizen and with the all-consuming theater of public life. It is not a flight into republican purism and fantasy. It wants to enhance our ordinary powers, enlarge the scope of our ordinary sympathies and ambitions, and render more intense our ordinary experience. It seeks to do so by diminishing the distance between the ordinary moves we may within institutional and ideological contexts take for granted and the extraordinary initiatives by which we challenge and change pieces of those contexts. Its agent and its beneficiary are one and the same: the real thing—the frail, self-interested, longing individual in the flesh, the victim of circumstance whom no circumstance can ever completely or definitively confine.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Left Alternative

Source: The Left Alternative (2009), p. 30-1

“The most marvelous experience of life is to transform life according to reality, not imagination.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power

Anaïs Nin photo

“I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”

Anaïs Nin book Incest: From a Journal of Love

July 7, 1934
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Variant: Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
Source: Incest: From a Journal of Love
Context: I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Rex Reason photo

“Hollywood left an indelible impression on my life; it was my life, and will remain with me as a wonderful experience. I am grateful for that marvelous time and for the many fans that still follow what I do and have done.”

Rex Reason (1928–2015) American actor

Interview with... Rex Reason http://maartenbouw.blogspot.com/2010/11/interview-with-rex-reason.html (November 16, 2010)

“I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

Related topics