Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 1

I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.”

Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child-bearing and man-bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her.

On the other hand, it is not by chance that intellectual and sensitive beings always give themselves to insensitive and inferior women. Such men need to suffer. Such intellectual and sensitive beings are generally little inclined to lie. This takes them all the more by surprise, that even though very intelligent, they live in the world of possibilities, react little, live in the pain that a woman has just inflicted upon them, rather than in the clear perception of what she wanted . . . Through this, the mediocre woman that one was surprised to see them love, enriches their universe much more than would have an intelligent woman.