Erica Jong Quotes
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When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.
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There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship, only backward.
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Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society.
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What storyteller is adequate to her story? The story carries us along, bottles on the tide, each with our secret mesage and the fervent hope that it does not turn out to be blank.
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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.
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It's important to know what you're going to spend your life on, and the only way you're going to find that is by connecting with the force inside yourself.
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We all carry the Houses of our Youth inside, and our Parents, too, grown small enough to fit within our Hearts.
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All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
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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.
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Few women see power as an end in itself. The point of power is the freedom to cultivate roses.
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Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.
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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.
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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.
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It was the old psychosomatic side-step. Everyone in my family dances it at every opportunity. You've given me a splitting headache! You've given me indigestion! You've given me crotch rot! You've given me auditory hallucinations! You've given me a heart attack! You've given me cancer!
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Feminism is really the right of women to be full human beings and to not be defined only by their childbearing function. Feminism is really the right of women to be human beings. That's it, yet that's so frightening to a lot of people. A full human being wants satisfying work and love. A full human being is entitled to both, and is not simply defined by only one aspect of her being.
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It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.
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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.
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Before things are written down they don't exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.
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Sex is God's joke on the human race ... if we didn't have sex to make us ridiculous, She would have had to think up something else instead.
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Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.
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Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love.
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How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.
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A concern with 'public morality' is - if not the last refuge of a scoundrel - the first foray of the fascist.
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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.