Erica Jong Quotes
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I knew I was in England by the smell.
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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.
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All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.
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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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The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultaneously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops - in general, doing everything men do.
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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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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.
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Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.
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Since flesh can't stay, we pass the words along.
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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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What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?
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Solitude is un-American.
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Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.
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People in the land of LaLa look like expensive wax fruit. And they work hard to achieve that look.
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I don't think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.
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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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Whenever I go anywhere but Italy for a vacation, I always feel vaguely disappointed, as if I have made a mistake.
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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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I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.
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Really true intimacy is rare and it depends on other things besides sex.
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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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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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A Soul is partly given, partly wrought; remember always that you are the Maker of your own Soul.