Little Birds - Anaïs Nin

« It is an interesting fact that very few writers have of their own accord sat down to write erotic tales or confessions. Even in France, where it is believed that the erotic has such an important role in life, the writers who did so were driven by necessity – the need of money. 

It is one thing to include eroticism in a novel or oa story and quite another to focus one’s whole attention on it. The first is like life itself. It is, I might say, natural, sincere, as in the sensual pages of Zola or of Lawrence. But focusing wholly on the sexual life is not natural. »

« Now, hunger is very good for stimulating the imagination… »

« They all took fright, like little birds, and ran away. »

« …a man, seemingly cornered in a pile of pillows, as if pushed there after a series of attacks, reclining like a pasha in a harem, very calm and contended… »

« Whenever sensuality shows its blossom, Lina hates it. She is jealous when she sees couples kissing in the streets of Paris, in the cafés, in the park. She looks at them with a strange look of anger. »

« I like to see her dress up for the evening in barbaric jewelry, her face so vivid. She was not for the gentle Paris, for the cafés. She was meant for the African jungle, orgies, dances. »

« Between her legs she was impaled on a rigid pole of puritanism. All the rest of her body was loose, provocative. »

« In the cellar of their house their father made a ceremony of burning D.H. Lawrence’s books, which betrays how far behind this family was in the development of the sensual life. »

« pungeant shell and and sea odors, as if woman came out of the sea as Venus did – mixed with the odor of the fur, and John’s suckling grew more violent. »

« I was born in one of the most interesting of western towns in America. I spent my days reading about foreign countries and was determined to live abroad at all cost. I was in love with my husband even before I met him because I had heard that he lived in China. When he fell in love with me, I expected it, as if it had all been planned beforehand. I was marrying China. I could barely see him as an ordinary man. He was tall, lean, about thirty-five, but he looked older. His life in China had been hard. He was vague about his occupations – he had worked at many things to earn money. He wore glasses and looked like a student. Somehow I was in love with the idea of China, so much that it seemed to me that my husband was no longer a white man but an Oriental. I thought he smelled different from other men. »

« The painter Novalis was newly married to Maria, a Spanish woman with whom he had fallen in love because she resembled the painting he most loved, the Maja Desnuda, by Goya. »

« What he asked was not the caprice of a lover, but the desire of a painter, of an artist. His eyes were hungry for her beauty. »

« My mother had European ideas about young girls. I was sixteen. I had never gone out alone with young men, I had never read anything but literary novels, and by choice I never was like girls my own age. I was what you would call a sheltered person, very much like some Chinese woman, instructed in the art of making the most of the discarded dresses sent to me by a rich cousin, singing and dancing, writing elegantly, reading the finest books, conversing intelligently, arranging my hair beuatifully, keeping my hands white and delicate, using only the refined English I had learned since my arrival from France, dealing with everybody in terms of great politeness. 

This was what was left of my European education. But I was very much like the Orientals in one other way : long periods of gentleness were followed by bursts of violence, taking the form of temper and rebellion or of quick decision and positive action. »

« My accomplishments were not very practical. I knew languages but not typewriting. I knew Spanish dancing but not the new ballroom dances. Everywhere I went I did not inspire confidence. I looked even younger than my age and over-delicate, over-sensitive. I looked as if I could not bear any burdens put on me, yet this was only an appearance. »

« She makes it difficult. She is European and she likes an intricate courtship. »

«There are women’s voices that sound like poetic, unearthly echoes. Then they change. The eyes change. I believe that all these legends about people changing into animals at night – like the stories of the werewolf, for instance – were invented by men who saw women transformed at night – from idealized, worshipful creatures into animals and thought that they were possessed. But I know it is something much simpler than that. »

« I love you as soon as I heard you speak with that accent you have. I felt as if I were traveling again. Your face is so different, your walk, your ways. »

« I love you because you remind me of Europe – Paris especially. I don’t know what there is about Paris, but there is sensuality in the air there. It is contagious. It is such a human city. I don’t know whether it is because couples are always kissing in the streets, at tables in the cafés, in the movies, in the parks. They embrace each other so freely. They stop for long complete kisses in the middle of the sidewalk, at the subway entrances. Perhaps it is that, or the softness of the air. I don’t know. In the dark, in each doorway at night there is a man and a woman almost melted  into one another. »

« This woman’s hair… it was the most sensual hair I have ever seen. Medusa must have had hair like this and with it seduced the men who fell under her spell. It was full of life, heavy, and as pungeant as if it had been bathed in sperm. To me it always felt as if it had been wrapped around a penis and soaked in secretions. It was the kind of hair I wanted to wrap around my own sex. It was warm and musky, oily, strong. It was the hair of an animal. It bristled when it was tocuhed. Merely to pass my fingers through it could give me an erection. I would have been content just touching her hair. »

« She was like a womb turned inside out. »

« His body smelled like a precious-wood forest ; his hair, like sandalwood, his skin, like cedar. It was as if he had always lived among trees and plants. »

« Afterwards he said happily, ‘You smell like a colored woman.’ And the spell was broken. »

« Her eyes are wide and liquid ; her cheeks luminous. Her mouth is full ; her hair blonde, and luxuriant. »

« She always comes to me eating candy, like a schoolgirl. »

« She looks at her legs and says, «’They are too thick. They are like Renoir legs, I was told once in Paris.’ »

« Their apartment is full of furnishings I find individually ugly – silver candelabra, tables with nooks for trailing flowers, enormous mulberry satin poufs, rococo objects, things full of chic, collected with snobbish playfulness, as if to say, ‘We can make fun of everything created by fashion, we are above it all.’ »

« I feel a little timid. She isn’t as inviting as Mary. She is, in fact, sexless, like the women at the beach or at the Turkish bath, who think nothing of their nakedness. »

Little Birds – Anaïs Nin