We don't see things as they are..

"We don't see things as they are,
 we see things as we are."
 -Anaïs Nin
(quoted in Doug Pagitt's wonderful "Church in the Inventive Age," p. 73


When I first saw the quote, I thought it said, 'we see things as we were."  That will preach, too.


More Nin quotes:

• "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
• "Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing."
• "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
• "If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation."
• "For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration."
• "It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before, to test your limits, to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
• "How wrong is it for a woman to expect man to build the world she wants, rather than set out to create it herself."
• "Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness."
• "Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself."
• "We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds."
• "The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy."
• "Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."
• "The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."
• "The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery"