“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.

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 "I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more w…" by Anaïs Nin?

Anaïs Nin photo

Anaïs Nin 278

writer of novels, short stories, and erotica 1903–1977

Related quotes

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.”

Ransom Riggs book Miss Peregrine's Home of Peculiar Children

Source: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011), Chapter 11, Page 351

“Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.”

Dean Koontz (1945) American author

“Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.”

György Ligeti

A lecture at the New England Conservatory in 1993, quoted on http://www.therestisnoise.com/2006/06/ligeti.html

“I have just discovered something I have always known: we can no more escape from one another than we can escape from God.”

Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) French writer

Chantal, p. 112
La joie (Joy) 1929

“I have been asked what I mean by 'word of honor.' I will tell you. Place me behind prison walls--walls of stone ever so high, ever so thick, reaching ever so far into the ground--there is a possibility that in some way or another I may escape; but stand me on the floor and draw a chalk line around me and have me give my word of honor never to cross it. Can I get out of the circle? No. Never! I'd die first!”

Karl G. Maeser (1828–1901) prominent Utah educator and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

BYU Honor Code http://honorcode.byu.edu/index.php?option=com_ezine&Itemid=4613

“When your back is against the wall, there's only one way to go and that's forward.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

On Rajiv Gandhi, reported in Steven R. Weisman, "India a Year Later: Gandhi Leaving His Mark", The New York Times (October 30, 1985), A-1.

“I believe that none of us are fully free when others in the human family remain shackled by poverty or disease or oppression.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Cape Town University Address (June 2013)

“I suspect that God is what you do, not what or who you believe in. When you do right, Jaxie, when you make good - well, then you are an instrument of God. Then you are joined to the divine, to the life force, to life itself. That's what I believe. That's what I hope for. And it's what I have missed. Think of it this way. When somebody does me a kindness, it enlarges me, adds to my life, you see? And not only mine - it adds to all life.”

Tim Winton (1960) Australian writer

Part III, Ch.3 - p.233
The Shepherd's Hut (2018)

“When I become a character in a movie or drama … I can think about the character only and not the complicated matters of my own life. I feel ecstasy in those moments and it’s what keeps me going as an actor. It’s not about the money, it’s not about the honor.”

Gong Yoo (1979) South Korean actor

Source: "Gong Yoo on becoming South Korea’s leading man" in CNN https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/28/asia/gong-yoo-talk-asia/index.html (30 August 2017)

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

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

Related topics