I must confess: I have a secret love affair.
I’m in love with the words of Anaïs Nin. From her diary, to her love letters, to the pages of erotica—her words call to me. It’s a siren’s song, and her words are perfect for love and for lovers.
Even the star-crossed lovers and those with broken hearts can find her words to be a balm for the soul. She gives voice to loneliness and to longing, to the trembling of desire and the soul-shaking power of loss. Her words whisper to us and echo deep in our hearts.
I seem to always have an Anaïs Nin quote floating in my consciousness. Her words are never far away from me, and on an otherwise unremarkable day, I can hear the whisper of those words reaching out.
We can allow her words to reach us and be our inspiration or our comfort, depending on what we need. On the day they came to me, the words were simply a joy.
I’ve known great heartbreak, and I’m lucky enough to be enjoying some true happiness now. But whatever we feel, we can let her words wash over us, each time feeling them anew. May it be of benefit.
On Love.
“Do not seek the because—in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.”
“How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.”
“You don’t find love, it finds you. It’s got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what’s written in the stars.”
On Loss.
“What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.”
“I feel a little like the moon who took possession of you for a moment and then returned your soul to you. You should not love me. One ought not to love the moon. If you come too near me, I will hurt you.”
“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.”
“Our love of each other was like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality.”
“He, who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it.”
“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.”
On Lovers.
“There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don’t work.”
“I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt.”
“He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.”
“I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced.”
“Too late for changes, too late perhaps for explanations and ideological webs, but the love goes on, the love goes on, blind to laws and warnings and even to wisdom and to fears. And whatever that love is, perhaps an illusion of a new love, I want it, I can’t resist it, my whole being melts in one kiss, my knowledge melts, my fears melt, my blood dances, my legs open.”
“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.”
“When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolf-like sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts.”
“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.”
~
Author: Crystal Jackson
Image: Instagram @truerebelclothing
Editor: Yoli Ramazzina
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