Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love [originally published 1954]

She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self. The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost; she had walked into pure chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the galloping of romantic riders in operas and legends, but which suddenly revealed the stage props: A papier-mache horse.

Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

from a spy in the house of love by anaïs nin

A Spy in the House of Love

– a spy in the house of love, anaïs nin

“You haven't loved yet... You've only been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, desire alone is not love, illusion is not love, dreaming is not love. All these were paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way.”

Anais Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

A Spy in the House of Love • Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love [originally published 1954]

Anais Nin from A Spy in the House of Love

[She] was quick to recognise the echoes of larger loves and desires. The large ones, particularly if they had not died a natural death, never died completely and left reverberations. Once interrupted, broken artificially, suffocated accidentally, they continued to exist in separate fragments and endless smaller echoes.

Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love

from a spy in the house of love by anaïs nin

Anger, Anger—at this core which will not melt, while Sabina wills to be like man, free to possess and desire in adventure, to enjoy a stranger. Her body will not melt, will not obey her fantasy of freedom. It cheated her of the adventure she had pursued. The fever, the hope, the mirage, the suspended desire, unfulfilled, would remain with her all night and the next day, burn undimmed within her and make others who saw her say: “How sensual she is!”

“At sixteen Sabina took moon baths, first of all because everyone else took sun baths, and second, she admitted, because she had been told it was dangerous. The effect of moon baths was unknown, but it was intimated that it might be the opposite of the sun’s effect. The first time she exposed herself she was frightened. What would the consequences be?”