"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who ...

...then he stretched himself alongside her to smoke a cigarette with all the ceremony of an opium dreamer.
~ Anaïs Nin ~












More Anaïs Nin quotes
"And silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, ...
"How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?
"I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from a man's and for which man's language was so inadeq...
"Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have...
"And in his eyes he had the look of the cat who inspires a desire to caress but loves no one, who never feels he must respond to the impulses he arouse...
"She abandoned herself to his whim, thinking it was to be an orgy of eyes and hands only.
"This great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes air, or swallows a snowflake, or yields to the sun.
"We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.
"The truth is that this is the only way I can live: in two directions. I need two lives. I am two beings. When I return to Hugo in the evening, to the ...
"I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essential...