"Writing ... is breathing"

I'm currently reading "Henry & June" by Anaïs Nin, based on the writer's relationship with writer Henry Miller and his wife, June. I shouldn't have picked up this book this week because I'm working on a big writing deadline and it keeps luring me away. But, oh, the inspiration found in her words.... Delicious! Nevermind that I'm writing about education reform. I'm still trying to capture a measure of the passion involved in such an effort. Nin writes luminously of complex emotions, of love and passion. I am humbled, as always, by the power of words.

I'm only 80 pages into the 274-page book, but here are a few passages I've underlined:

– "How late I have awakened and with what furor!"

– “Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives.”

To Henry Miller she writes:

– “For you and me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds, and you and I both lose it in the same way, through love.”

– “Writing is not for us, an art, but breathing.”

– “I don’t hear your words: your voice reverberates against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you into me. I could stuff my ears and it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.”