Erica Jong Quotes
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Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!
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Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
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Home is where your books are.
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Plot is just a fancy way of saying 'and then.
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If you don't have time to do it right you must have time to do it right you must have time to do it over. If you don't know where you are going, how do you know when you get there? If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
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Is there no Villain in this World who doth not regard himself as a poor abus'd Innocent, no She-Wolf who doth not think herself a Lamb, no Shark who doth not fancy that she is a Goldfish?
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What makes a Man love Death, Fanny? Is it because he hopes to avert his own by watchin' the Deaths of others? Doth he hope to devour Death by devourin' Executions with his Eyes? I'll ne'er understand it, if I live to be eight hundred Years. The Human Beast is more Beast than Human, 'tis true.
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Is there not an Arabick Proverb which goes, 'No one throws Stones at a Barren Tree'?
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I believe that there's a force of life in the universe, and that when we're writing or making music or painting, we're likely to connect with that flow.
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Humor is one of the most serious tools we have for dealing with impossible situations.
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Without the gods, how would I sing?' I asked. With your own voice,' he said.
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Why do analysts always answer a question with a question?
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If there's anything the world disdains more than uppity young women, it's uppity old women. Dying young has always been a woman's best career move.
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Venice is ever the fragile labyrinth at the edge of the sea and it reminds us how brief and perilous the journeys of our lives are; perhaps that is why we love it so. City of plagues and brief liaisons, city of lingering deaths and incendiary loves, city of chimeras, nightmares, pigeons, bells. You are the only city in the world whose dialect has a word for the shimmer of canal water reflected on the ceiling of a room.
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There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness - her selfishness, in short - is a reproach to the American way of life.
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A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
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All people believe their suffering is greater than others.
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There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.
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Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.
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Conflict is the soul of literature.
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I knew I was in England by the smell.
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I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.
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The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultaneously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops - in general, doing everything men do.
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Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.