Anaïs Nin

I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. 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__ mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don__ mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.

I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

Motherhood is a vocation like any other. It should be freely chosen, not imposed upon woman.

You are a real hermaphrodite, Mafouka,_ I said. 'That is what our age is supposed to have produced because the tension between the masculine and the feminine has broken down, people are mostly half of one and half of the other. But I have never seen it before__ctually, physically. It must make you very unhappy.

You haven't loved yet," he said. "You've only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, illusion is not love, desire alone is not love. All these were paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way.

You sought to preserve your creative instincts and what would nourish them. But neurosis itself does not nourish the artist, you know; he creates in spite of it, out of anything, any material given to him. The torments and hells of [crazy men], are not for you.

I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.

The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.

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

Wherever this is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me.

Wherever there is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

I never lose sight of the whole. An impeccable dress is made to be lived in, to be torn, wet, stained, crumpled.

For our anxiety is the one thing we cannot place on the shoulders of others, it suffocates them.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.

I put artistic values above all others. Because writing, for me, is an expanded world, a limitless world, containing all.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.