Before 'Fifty Shades,' there was Anaïs Nin, and today is her birthday

Mary Cadden | USA TODAY

Anaïs Nin, the famed French writer best known for her contribution to erotic literature, had a lot to say about love. Decades before E.L. James' best-selling Fifty Shades trilogy, Nin, who died in 1977 at age 73, was penning passion, both in fiction — Delta of Venus — and non-fiction with her seven-volume The Diary of Anaïs Nin.

And before the Fifty Shades film franchise, there was the 1990 film Henry & June (which starred Uma Thurman, Fred Ward and Maria de Medeiros), based on Nin's book Henry and June: From a Journal of Love - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin 1931-1932. In it Nin writes of the year she met the author Henry Miller and his wife June, and chronicles her relationship with the couple.

In honor of the 115th anniversary of Nin's birth (Feb. 21, 1903), we have collected some of the writer's tamer quotes:

On life:

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”

On men and women:

“How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?” “I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.”

On writing:

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

On friendship:

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”

On love: