Erica Jong Quotes
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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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Nothing you write is ever lost to you. At some other level your mind is working on it.
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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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The Passion that one Soul hath for God cannot be judged by another.
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And what if I don't want forgiveness?
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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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Feminism is teaching. I've gotten a lot of pleasure pushing younger writers that I've met and worked with.
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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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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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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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What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?
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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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Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
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A man assumes that a woman's refusal is just part of a game. Or, at any rate, a lot of men assume that. When a man says no, it's no. When a woman says no, it's yes, or at least maybe. There is even a joke to that effect. And little by little, women begin to believe in this view of themselves.
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The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.
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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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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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I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.
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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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If we can be sufficient unto ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs.
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Really true intimacy is rare and it depends on other things besides sex.
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Is perception equivalent to existence?
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I've become more conservative about sex as I've gotten older.
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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.