Erica Jong Quotes
-
Dogs come into our lives to teach us about love and loyalty. They depart to teach us about loss. A new dog never replaces an old dog; it merely expands the heart. If you have loved many dogs, your heart is very big.
-
To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.
-
You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.
-
Denounce useless guilt. Don’t make a cult of suffering. Live in the now(or at least the soon). Always do the things you fear most. Courage is an acquired taste like caviar. Trust all joy. If the evil eye fixes you in its gaze, look elsewhere. Get ready to be 87.
-
Blaming women is always in fashion.
-
Love gives without taking.
-
Because I loved myself, I was loved.
-
If we ban whatever offends any group in our diverse society, we will soon have no art, no culture, no humor, no satire. Satire is by its nature offensive. So is much art and political discourse. The value of these expressions far outweighs their risk.
-
Betrayal betrays the betrayer.
-
Coupling doesn't always have to do with sex ... Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.
-
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
-
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
-
I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound.
-
When everyone thinks they know you, it's hard not to be guarded.
-
Flesh is merely a lesson. We learn it & pass on.
-
As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid - as if we'd disabled them utterly. Do all women have to keep silent for men to speak? Do all women have to be legless for men to walk?
-
In a way women are fleshier because of estrogen. It's hard for us to lose weight because when we get super skinny we don't ovulate. Women in camps during the Holocaust didn't menstruate and didn't ovulate. They were starving; they were terrified. Why emulate that condition? It's nonsensical to me.
-
I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.
-
The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn't mean you can't exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.
-
This is the sad bed of chosen chastity because you are miles and mountains away.
-
Never follow a dog act. You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life.
-
I am thinking of the onion again. . . . Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like ripples.
-
Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound.
-
Good sex is a mystery. Perhaps humping and pumping is not a mystery, but good sex is a mystery, and how human beings become truly intimate remains a mystery.