Erica Jong Quotes
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Really true intimacy is rare and it depends on other things besides sex.
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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.
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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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How could one create life with someone who represented death?
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In freeing myself from the romantic dream of finding another man to come along and rescue me, I learned that no one can rescue me except myself.
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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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I actually think leaving your children alone to fantasize, to write, to make projects on their own is good for them. Breathing down their necks is a form of control. Children should have their own space.
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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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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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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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I don't necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I'm trying to finish.
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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.
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Writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.
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Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile.
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The Passion that one Soul hath for God cannot be judged by another.
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Is perception equivalent to existence?
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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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Without the gods, how would I sing?' I asked. With your own voice,' he said.
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Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.
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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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A baby's a full time job for three adults. Nobody tells you that when you're pregnant, or you'd probably jump off a bridge. Nobody tells you how all-consuming it is to be a mother-how reading goes out the window and thinking too.
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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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They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.
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Feminism is teaching. I've gotten a lot of pleasure pushing younger writers that I've met and worked with.