Erica Jong Quotes
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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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Why do analysts always answer a question with a question?
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Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.
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In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.
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Fear is a sign-usually a sign that I'm doing something right.
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From Roman times to the present, Italy has been a country to fall in love with - a tribute to all that is enduring, crazy, pagan, joyous, melancholy, at once banal and divine, in the human spirit.
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It is for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write.
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Sex doesn't disappear, it just changes forms.
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The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.
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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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We find our calling or it finds us, and it's a sin against the fates not to use your talent when you have it.
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I look forward and see myself look back.
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A baby's mother also needs a mother.
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Isn't it our job to be appalled by our parents? Isn't it every generation's duty to be dismayed by the previous generation? And to assert that we are different - only to discover later that we are distressingly the same?
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Without the gods, how would I sing?' I asked. With your own voice,' he said.
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If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.
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Art is always an energy exchange.
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The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy.
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I don't think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.
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My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.
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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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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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It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.