Anaïs Nin, From A Diary Entry Featured In Trapeze: The Unexpurgated Diary Of Anais Nin, 1947-1955

You are not responsible for making people understand your choices. Let them be confused.

"For women, only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another: the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines of age. There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to want to continue looking like girls." — Excerpt from Susan Sontag's 1978 essay The Double Standard of Aging

Franz Kafka, from a letter to Milena Jesenka featured in "Letters to Milena,

Crows

By Enchanted Journal

No man has ever looked at me the way you do. Its not lust. Its not love either. Its beyond human experience, something no one has ever witnessed, so it lacks a name. Its something higher than simple love.

May 12 to 13, 1913 Letters to Felice by Franz Kafka First published : 1973

erin lecount, sweet fruit

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