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Quote by Anaïs Nin

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”

Quote by Anaïs Nin

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The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

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Anaïs Nin

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“She glared at him through tear-filled eyes. “You talk of your pain? You cannot even begin to understand the sacrifice I have made. I gave away a piece of myself, my soul! But I did it out of love, never think otherwise. I made the choice to live my life without her because I knew in my heart she would be better off without me and I could not bear to know that a life created out of such perfect love would be forced to live with the ugly truth of her birth. I thought,” she sobbed, breaking down before him. “I thought…I did the right thing.”

“As he clutched her in his shaking hands and wept against her, he whispered into her ear, the words that made him believe. “Love bears all things. Endures all things,” he said. “Ours has, hasn’t it?” She nodded and held him tighter. “But can it endure this, Anais? This demon who holds me so mercilessly in its claws?” She touched his face and kissed him. “My love can and will, Lindsay. I will be here when you open your eyes. I will give you whatever you need to make it more bearable.”

“I don’t want to relax. I don’t want to … oh, dear Lord.” He had bent his head to her throat, searching for the visible thrum of her pulse. A light, hot shock went through her. “Don’t do that,” she said weakly, but he was insistent, his mouth wickedly soft, and her breath hitched as she felt the brush of his tongue. Her hands shot to his muscle-banked shoulders. “Mr. Rohan, you mustn’t—” “This is how to kiss, Amelia.” He cradled her head in his palms, deftly tilting it to the side. “Noses go here.” Another disorienting brush of his mouth, a wash of sensual heat. “You taste like sugar and tea.” “I already know how to kiss!” “Do you?” His thumb passed over her kiss-heated lips, urging them to part. “Then show me,” he whispered. “Let me in, Amelia.” Never in her life had she thought a man would say something so outrageous to her. And if the words were improper, the gleam in his eyes was positively immolating. “I … I’m a spinster.” She offered the word as if it were a talisman. Everyone knew that rakish gentlemen were supposed to leave spinsters alone. But it appeared no one had told Cam Rohan. A covert smile deepened the corners of his mouth. “That’s not going to keep you safe from me.” She tried to turn away from him, but his hands guided her face back to his. “I can’t seem to leave you alone. In fact, I’m reconsidering my entire policy on spinsters.”

“Was it so very obvious that I was not married? Of course it was. For one thing, I had no husband with me, looking after and indulging me. But there was something else about married women that I noticed, their solid smugness at not having to worry about the course of their future. Married women were set like jelly in a mold, whereas spinsters like me were formless and unpredictable.”

“At first reading, these are stories about love and marriage and the conventional heterosexual happily-ever-after. Only at the second does a sneaky doubt perhaps creep in to suggest that maybe marriage is not the best thing that could ever happen to these women. It has been suggested that with these clever layers of meaning, Jane was perhaps even more subversive than we give her credit for. Yes, she was writing for the commercial market. But she was also writing for her female cronies, for Martha Lloyd, Cassandra and Miss Sharp. She glibly provided the happy endings that society expected, but in an off-hand, almost perfunctory fashion. You don’t have to believe in Jane’s happy endings if you don’t want to. I like to think that this is the band of spinsters’ last laugh.”

“That's what's so ironic about the conservative backlash against BDSMers. With increased visibility comes increased bigotry, and conservatives continue to rally against kinky events by local groups to get them shut down. What the anti-kink fanatics don't understand about us is that we're geeks. Sex nerds. SM intellectuals. We pay money to spend a weekend going to classes.”