Nin On Not Aspiring to a Coma

1... And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. 


2... Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living. 


3... Good things happen to those who hustle. 


4... Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. 


5... Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. 


6... Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.


7... There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. 


8... Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country. 


9... When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others. 


10... I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I cannot 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.