Anais Nin

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 inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be...including our perception. Of it

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.

Instead of answering her as soon as he saw her hair grow electric, her face more vivid, her eyes like lightning, her body restless and jerky like a racehorse’s, he retired behind this wall of objective understanding, this gentle testing and acceptance of her, just as one watches an animal in the zoo and smiles at his antics, but is not drawn into this mood. It was this which left Lilith in a state of isolation - indeed, like a wild animal in an absolute desert.

All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished.

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

We are cruel when someone refuses to play the role in which we have cast him. We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us.

The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.

I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated

Ordinary life does not interest me.

Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home.

I believe the lasting revolution comes from deep changes in ourselves which influence our collective life.

What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.

Your strength is soft, indirect, delicate, tender, womanly. But it is strength just the same.

Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.

Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you.

The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.

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

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.