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I should be working on my novel but what I really want to do is to write you such a love letter that you will require a safety vault in the style of the man-sized one we saw in the movies yesterday.

— Anaïs Nin, in a letter to Henry Miller d. May 28, 1932, from A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953

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Letters. I owe you many, but I cannot write letters. I have forgotten how to write, forgotton pain, learning and thought. The only books I am interested in are the ones you have marked. There must be a you in them.

— Anaïs Nin, in a letter to Henry Miller d. May 28, 1932, from A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953

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your influence—the terror...

— Anaïs Nin, in a letter to Henry Miller d. February 25, 1932, from A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953

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God, it is maddening to think that even one day must pass without writing.

— Anaïs Nin, in a letter to Henry Miller d. February 4, 1932, from A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953

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Beware of being trapped in your own imaginings—you instill sparks in others, you charge them with your illusions, and when they burst forth into illuminations, you are taken in.

— Hugo to Anaïs Nin, from the introduction in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953

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Aware of you, chaotically.

— Anaïs Nin, in a letter to Henry Miller d. March 10, 1932, from A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953

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All of this is true but none of it is where reality is. There is another reality, the personal one. And then there’s the secret one that is as dark as the blood beating in my veins, a cold river flowing undetected far from view, a place of uncertainty and premonition. Something is moving there that does not need me where I cannot imagine. A darkness to which the eyes can never become adjusted.

— Teju Cole, Tremor

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She places her hand on my fist. Her hand covers my fist. I let my hand fall open. She moves her hand down and crosses her wrist against mine and now I’m almost asleep. When and where were you happiest? My one remaining contact with wakefulness is the flat inside of her wrist resting on the flat inside of mine, as though each wrist were seeking the other’s pulse. I listen for the soft beat of blood through the skin. I listen as best as I can in the dimming stillness. I slow my breathing and soon I hear nothing.

— Teju Cole, Tremor

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How gently and inconspicuously she cast the net I long for around me, and how playfully and how like a pixie she me the sweet poison to drink.

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She left me — left me indeed. Yes, it was autumn, it was fate, that had given the summer rose so full and ripe a scent.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

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All these thoughts that had arisen between her and me seemed so intimate and well known, fashioned from a mythology and an imagery so entirely my own.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

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—I thought, not of her, but of what Hermine had said. It seemed to me that it was not, perhaps, her own thoughts but mine. She had read them like a clairvoyant, breathed them in and given them back, so that they had a form of their own and came to me as something new.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

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Our only guide is our home-sickness.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

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Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of hours —

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

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You are much too exacting and hungry for this simple, easygoing and easily contented world of today. You have a dimension too many.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

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My happiness fills me with content and I can bear it for a long while yet. But sometimes when happiness leaves a moment's leisure to look about me and for things, the longing I have is not to keep this happiness forever, but to suffer once again, only more beautifully and less meanly than before. I long for the sufferings that make me ready and willing to die.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

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The unhappiness that I need and long for is different. It is of the kind that will let me suffer with eagerness and die with lust. That is the unhappiness, or happiness, that I'm waiting for.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf