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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?
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
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Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.
Erica Jong -
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.
Erica Jong -
I didn't believe in systems. Everything human was imperfect and ultimately absurd. What did I believe in then? In humor. In laughing at systems, at people, at one's self. In laughing even at one's need to laugh all the time. In seeing life as contradictory, many-sided, various, funny, tragic, and with moments of outrageous beauty. In seeing life as a fruitcake, including delicious plums and bad peanuts, but meant to be devoured hungrily all the same because you couldn't feast on the plums without also sometimes being poisoned by the peanuts.
Erica Jong -
The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel
Erica Jong -
The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.
Erica Jong -
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.
Erica Jong
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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.
Erica Jong -
Is perception equivalent to existence?
Erica Jong -
The Passion that one Soul hath for God cannot be judged by another.
Erica Jong -
What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not exhortation. Freedom is a loose leash, license to be different from your mother and still be loved...Freedom is...not insisting that your daughter share your limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.
Erica Jong -
Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.
Erica Jong -
If we can be sufficient unto ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs.
Erica Jong
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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.
Erica Jong -
The soul is awakened through service.
Erica Jong -
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.
Erica Jong -
To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.
Erica Jong -
The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach.
Erica Jong -
I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I will have to begin the process all over again.
Erica Jong
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Sadly, because of the enormous gap between rich and poor, some mothers can afford helpers, but many can't. Those who can would be kinder to refrain from criticizing other women.
Erica Jong -
Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old.
Erica Jong -
A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
Erica Jong -
They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.
Erica Jong