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"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't mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don't 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."
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"Oleanders have attractive flowers, they decorate nature beautifully, but they are poisonous; and a woman is an oleander; it's all right to watch her once in a while, but then you must walk away without touching her; if you ever try to taste her even once, you'll head for hell!"

"Most often women want happiness and men want wilderness."

"When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women."

"Men as a class appear to be 'at risk, ' maybe even at high risk."

"And a woman by herself is missing a man, while a man by himself is his own master. Trousers. That's the secret. Trousers and a pair of socks. I never dreamed it was like this. Put on trousers and the world changes. We walk different. We act different. I see these girls and I think: Idiot's Get yourself some trousers!"

"A man's shortcoming lies in the belief that he must always assert his manliness. A woman's shortcoming lies in the belief that she must always repress it."

"Women are binding and men are commanding."

"I'll never forget the first time Davram took me by the scruff of my neck and showed me he was the stronger of us. It was magnificent! If a woman is stronger than her husband, she comes to despise him. She has the choice of either tyrannizing him or else making herself less in order not to make him less. If the husband is strong enough, though, she can be as strong as she is, as strong as she can grow to be."

"Women often forget that the man she is complaining about is a creation of a mother like her."
Explore more quotes by Anais Nin

"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."

"Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one..."

"I am not always just living, just following all my fantasies; I come up for air, for understanding."

"Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime."

"I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic - in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself."

"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."
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