135"She is quite mad, in a sense, I thought; subject to fears and manias. Her talk was mostly unconscious. The contents of her flowering imagination are reality to her. But what is she building so carefully? A heightened sense of her own personality, a glorifying of it? I do not think her power is directed. Even she is baffled by it. I want to force her into reality. I want to grasp her hands, find out whether this love of woman is real or not. I, who am sunk in dreams, in half-lived acts, I want to do violence to her. Why do I want that? Do I get angry with her self-deceptions which are like mine? Her subtlety makes me desire frankness; the quicksands of her evasions make me, for the first time, demand clarity. At times I feel as she does, like taking flights from selves I do not know, and at other times I feel like pursuing and exposing these selves into crude daylight. Why do I doubt her? Perhaps she is very sensitive and hypersensitive people become false when others doubt them. They vacillate. And one thinks them insincere. Yet I want to believe her. At the same time, it does not seem very important that she should love me. I am so filled with my love for her. At the same time, I feel that I am dying. She says of me, “You are at once so decadent and so alive.” She is so decadent and so alive. Our love would be death." - Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume I