A Constant Deformer

Such entanglements in relations between men and women, between reality and unreality, fantasies and life, are denied by most people.

The first analysis of an event or a person yields a certain aspect.  If we look at it again, it has another face.  The further we progress in our reinterpretation, the more prismatic are the moods and the imaginings coordinating the facts differently each time.  People who want a sane, static, measurable world take the first aspect of an event or person and stick to it, with an almost self-protective obstinacy, or by a natural limitation of their imaginations.  They do not indulge in either deepening or magnifying.

But others know the imagination is a constant deformer.  It needs to be, it must be, in order to be capable of extending from comparatively small happenings, in a comparatively short span of life.  Otherwise to understand one thought, one feeling, we would have to go through a thousand experiences.  But one experience can be multiplied out by our imagination.  And it is this power to multiply and to expand which creates at the same time intricacies and entanglements.  Entanglements are the other face of the same activity.

--Anais Nin, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, 1932.