Erica Jong Quotes
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Writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.
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Since flesh can't stay, we pass the words along.
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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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Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.
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Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.
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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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Conflict is the soul of literature.
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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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The Passion that one Soul hath for God cannot be judged by another.
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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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What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?
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Images are ... a kind of emotional shorthand.
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Art is always an energy exchange.
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And what if I don't want forgiveness?
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of all the foolish Fears of Humankind, Fear of the Future is by far the most foolish.
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You have to enjoy being a woman. Why should being a woman be such a negative thing where you always have to improve yourself? I have never in my entire life met a man who didn't want to go to bed with me because I was too fat.
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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.
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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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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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The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns all the shades of the rainbow and stops aching. We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think this one is better, because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before.
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Sex doesn't disappear, it just changes forms.
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A baby's mother also needs a mother.
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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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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.