Erica Jong Quotes
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A Soul is partly given, partly wrought; remember always that you are the Maker of your own Soul.
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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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Writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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How could one create life with someone who represented death?
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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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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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Without the gods, how would I sing?' I asked. With your own voice,' he said.
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Is perception equivalent to existence?
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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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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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I don't think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.
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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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I prefer to work in the morning. I get up now at five in the morning. In the morning is when I feel freshest.
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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.
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To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.
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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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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.