Anais Nin

Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.

You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.

Guilt is the one burden human beings can’t bear alone. As soon as a crime is committed, there is a telephone call, or a confession to strangers.

I think we are more severe judges of our own acts than professional judges. We judge our thoughts, our intents, our secret curses, our secret hates, not only our acts.

Also the cape held within its folds something of what she imagined was a quality possessed exclusively by man: some dash, some audacity, some swagger of freedom denied to woman.

In watching the moon she acquired the certainty of the expansion of time, by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity of experience.

The flame of accelerated living by fever glowed in her and drew people to her as the lights of night life drew passersby out of the darkness of empty streets.

and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.

Behind windows there are either enemies or worshippers. Never neutrality or passivity. Always intention and premeditation.

I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.