Fatherhood Quote by Anais Nin

"I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern"

Anais Nin, Author

About this Quote

Affection doesn not vanish here so much as it curdles into choreography. Nin is ruthless about separating love (a feeling, however conflicted) from what she calls "slavery to a pattern": the inherited script of daughterhood, obedience, guilt, and repetition that keeps running even after the heart has checked out. The shock of the first sentence is deliberate. It refuses the sentimental pact that family bonds are automatically sacred, then pivots to a colder, more diagnostic truth: the relationship persists as habit, not intimacy.

"Slavery" is not casual rhetoric. It frames the family dynamic as coercive and internalized, less about what the father does in the present than about the psychological machinery he helped install. "Pattern" suggests something eerily impersonal - a template that can outlive the person who created it. That is the subtext: the father is both individual and system, and the real antagonist is the loop in the self, the reflex to seek approval or replay old wounds.

In Nin's world, biography is never just backstory; it is the pressure point. Her diaries circle around desire, betrayal, and the ways patriarchal authority gets smuggled into the psyche as "normal". This line reads like a self-exorcism: naming the mechanism so it can be broken. It also carries a modern bite. It anticipates therapy-speak about cycles and attachment, but without the comfort of tidy healing. The freedom Nin imagines begins not with forgiveness, but with refusing to confuse obligation for love.

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About the Author

Anais Nin

Anais Nin (February 21, 1903 - January 14, 1977) was a Author from USA.

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