Erica Jong Quotes
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We write poems as leaves give oxygen - so we can breathe.
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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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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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I knew I was in England by the smell.
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The problem with feminism in the second wave was that we fought so much among ourselves, and I think we did so much damage to the movement... and I think the next wave, the third wave, is women mentoring younger women and women helping younger women to enter the political process and the writing world.
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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.
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What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?
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I think a lot of people, when they read about a woman who acknowledges her sexuality and her feelings, get really scared. They say they want to be fearless, but in reality they're terrified. If they acknowledge their deepest feelings, they might have to change their lives.
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Sex doesn't disappear, it just changes forms.
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You reach a point in life where you realize that you might as well do what you need to do, because your being loved or not being loved is really a function of the people you encounter and not of yourself. That is an immensely liberating insight.
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Language can't be appropriated by one person, one poet. The words belong to all of us.
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I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.
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Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
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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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I prefer to work in the morning. I get up now at five in the morning. In the morning is when I feel freshest.
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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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Surviving means being born over and over.
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There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship-only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier.
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I think we’re men and women more similar. In that we all deal with our fantasy lives and sometimes are disappointed by reality.
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Since flesh can't stay, we pass the words along.