#Quotes from Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus

I do not like the companionship of women. They are petty and personal. They hang on to their mysteries and secrets, they act and pretend. I like the character of men better. [35, Artists and Models]

Most of the time the sexual life is a secret. Everybody conspires to make it so. Even the best of friends do not tell each other the details of their sexual lives. [62, Marianne]

You have a habit of turning back, starting a walk and turning back. That is very bad. It is the very first crimes against life. I believe in audacity. [75, Elena]

The most haunting woman is the one we cannot find in the crowded cafe when we are looking for her, the one that we must hunt for, and seek out through the disguises of her stories. [76, Elena]

The quality which set everyone to hunt her down was something in her that was violently sensual, alive, earthy; her full mouth was all the more vivid because of the delicate body that moved with the fragility of tulle. [81, Elena]

So each time he saw the breasts of big, full women who resembled his mother, he experienced the desire to suckle, to chew, to bite and even hurt them, to press them against his face, to suffocate under their bursting fullness, to fill his mouth with the nipples, but he felt no desire to possess with sexual penetration. [82, Elena]

Because he did not understand his nature, he had at first blamed her, put on her burden of his frigidity toward woman. He said it was because she was intelligent, and intelligent women mixed literature and poetry with love, which paralyzed him; and that she was positive, masculine, in some of her ways, and this intimidated him. She was so young at the time, she had readily accepted this and come to believe that slender, intellectual, positive women could not be desired. [84, Elena]

He was beautiful. He had a slender Egyptian body, wild hair like that of a child who had been running. At times the softness of his gestures made him seem small, but when he stood up, stylized, pure in line, stretched, then he seemed tall. His eyes were in a trance, and he talked flowingly, like a medium. [84, Elena]

Talking together is a form of intercourse. You and I exist together in all the delirious countries of the sexual world. You draw me into the marvelous. Your smile keeps a mesmeric flow. [85, Elena]

They would lie on their stomachs, still dressed, open a new book and read together, with their hands caressing each other. The kissed over erotic pictures. Their mouths, glued together, fell over enormous protruding women's asses, legs open like a compass, men squatting like dogs, with huge members almost dragging the floor. [95, Elena]

You can't love so many times. I want my eroticism mixed with love. And deep love one does not often experience. [100, Elena]

Bijou, who was the whore of whores, would have like to exchange places with Elena. Whores always envy women who have the faculty of arousing desire and illusion as well as hunger. Bijou, the sex organ walking undisguised, would have liked the appearance of Elena. And Elena was thinking of how she would have liked to change places with Bijou, for the many times when men grew tired of courting and wanted sex without it, bestial and direct. [116, Elena]

A maternal woman opened the door, but a maternal woman whose cold eyes traveled almost immediately to the man's shoes, for she judged from them how much he could afford to pay for his pleasure. Then for he own satisfaction, her eyes rested for a while on the trouser buttons. Faces did not interest her. Her life was spent exclusively  in dealings with this region of man's anatomy. Her big eyes, still bright, had a piercing way of looking into the trousers as if they could gauge the size and weight of the man's possessions. It was a professional look. [133, The Basque and Bijou]

He was a connoisseur, a gourmet, of women's jewel boxes. He liked them velvet-lined and cozy, affectionate and clinging. [134, The Basque and Bijou]