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I know some good marriages-marriages where both people are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other.
Erica Jong -
Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.
Erica Jong
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When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.
Erica Jong -
The absolute bedrock of our independence is having control over our own bodies. You cannot be independent if the government or someone else says whether or not you can use birth control. Unless you're in charge of your body, you're not in charge of anything. I think that's really the bottom line of feminism.
Erica Jong -
Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.
Erica Jong -
Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.
Erica Jong -
Women who bear children before they establish serious habits of work, may never establish them at all.
Erica Jong -
All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
Erica Jong
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I'm not classically pretty; I've always been too heavy; I've had thyroid disease and it's very hard for me to lose weight - but I've always had men pursue me. I've always had that 'it' thing. God knows why. Maybe it's pheromones, I don't know.
Erica Jong -
Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love.
Erica Jong -
I have ne'er been in a chamber with a lawyer when I did not wish either to scream with desperation or else fall into the deepest of sleeps, e'en when the matter concern'd my own future most profoundly.
Erica Jong -
I've kept journals at many times in my life starting from when I was about 13 or 14. But it's boring and contrived to keep a journal every day. Better to write as the mood strikes.
Erica Jong -
A concern with 'public morality' is - if not the last refuge of a scoundrel - the first foray of the fascist.
Erica Jong -
The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.
Erica Jong
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Poetry is fired by love.
Erica Jong -
Being a daughter is only half the equation; bearing one is the other.
Erica Jong -
The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.
Erica Jong -
Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.
Erica Jong -
Don't ye know that ev'ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?
Erica Jong -
Pleasure is terrifying because it breaks down the boundaries between people. Embracing passion means living with fear.
Erica Jong
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I can live without it all - love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.
Erica Jong -
I am not quite sure how writing changes things, but I know that it does. It is indirect-like the trails of earthworms aerating the earth. It is not always deliberate-like the tails of glowing dust dragged by comets.
Erica Jong -
Women in America read 'lifestyle' pages which are really glorifications of shopping. They teach us we must veil ourselves in make-up to be loved. And we willingly take the veil, thinking ourselves freed by it. Make-up is no more optional for us than the veil is for Arab women: it is our Western version of the chador.
Erica Jong -
Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists; he is afraid.
Erica Jong