Erica Jong said about her : "The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad."
Anais Nin says :
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
"I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ"
How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?"
"Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are."
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
"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 can not 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."
"I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman."
"From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life."
"I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.
"There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest."
"I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you."
"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together."
"The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say."
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living."
"Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves"
"Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key!"
"Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously.
"The secret of joy is the mastery of pain."
"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery."
"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."
"We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them."
"Societies in decline have no use for visionaries."
"Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it."
"I hate men who are afraid of women's strength."
"The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest."
"I sat there for three hours and did not feel the time or the boredom of our talk and its foolish disconnection. As long as I could hear his voice, I was quite lost, quite blind, quite outside my own self."
"What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again."
"I want to make my own discoveries…….penetrate the evil which attracts me"
I have no brakes on...analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life."
"There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do."
"The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy."
"Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."
"What I cannot love, I overlook."
"I know why familles were created, with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed."
"Many couples, many people, are not living with real human beings, but with their ghosts. Who has not followed for years the spell of a particular tone of voice, from voice to voice, as the fetishist follows a beautiful foot, scarcely seeing the woman herself? A voice, a mouth, an eye, all stemming from the original fountain of our first desire, directing it, enslaving us, until we choose to unravel the fatal web and free ourselves."
"Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones."
"His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that...only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it."
"For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love."
He guides my inexperienced hands. It is like a forest fire, to be with him. New places of my body are aroused and burnt. He is incendiary. I leave him in an unquenchable fever."
"When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others."
Man invented a woman to suit his needs. He disposed of her by identifying her with nature and then paraded his contemptuous domination of nature. But woman is not nature only.
She is the mermaid with her fish-tail dipped in the unconscious."
She is the mermaid with her fish-tail dipped in the unconscious."
"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."
"Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem."
"He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity. "
"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 does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."
"Good things happen to those who hustle."
