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The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with you and possess that quality of joy.
Erica Jong -
I hope we don't have to keep going back over the same territory and winning the same rights over and over again. The battle for birth control. The battle for abortion. The parity of women's health. It's very depressing to think that you win these rights, but then you have to win them again, and again, and again, and fight the same battles over and over.
Erica Jong
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We write poems as leaves give oxygen - so we can breathe.
Erica Jong -
Many, many people have done a lot more sexual experimentation than I have.
Erica Jong -
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.
Erica Jong -
Whenever I go anywhere but Italy for a vacation, I always feel vaguely disappointed, as if I have made a mistake.
Erica Jong -
We've shown again and again, in every UN report on the status of women, that wherever women control their own bodies and have access to education, societies prosper. Men's fortunes go up, children's fortunes go up. This is not news - it's been proven repeatedly. Anywhere those things are threatened, we have to defend them.
Erica Jong -
Humor is one of the most serious tools we have for dealing with impossible situations.
Erica Jong
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Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.
Erica Jong -
Conflict is the soul of literature.
Erica Jong -
I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.
Erica Jong -
People in the land of LaLa look like expensive wax fruit. And they work hard to achieve that look.
Erica Jong -
The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy.
Erica Jong -
A baby's mother also needs a mother.
Erica Jong
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Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.
Erica Jong -
In freeing myself from the romantic dream of finding another man to come along and rescue me, I learned that no one can rescue me except myself.
Erica Jong -
I remember everything but forgive anyway.
Erica Jong -
I am against censorship. I prefer the chaos of uncontrollable communication of all sorts to selective banning of certain materials. I do not think human beings can be trusted to be above politics and to promote the common good. One group's common good is another group's evil.
Erica Jong -
Writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.
Erica Jong -
Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world.
Erica Jong
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Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile.
Erica Jong -
Women tend to be preservers of the social structure, of marriage. They don't want to upset their husbands or their significant others. They don't want to hurt people.
Erica Jong -
It is not surprising that Venice is known above all for mirrors and glass since Venice is the most narcissistic city in the world, the city that celebrates self-mirroring.
Erica Jong -
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.
Erica Jong