Erica Jong Quotes
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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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Few women see power as an end in itself. The point of power is the freedom to cultivate roses.
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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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Being a daughter is only half the equation; bearing one is the other.
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If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.
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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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My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.
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Most sex is not really intimate.
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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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Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists; he is afraid.
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I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.
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The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.
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Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?
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Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.
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Genius is a strong aphrodisiac.
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I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.
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certain very old people reach an age where every funeral becomes some sort of insane confirmation of strength, rather than of vulnerability, as it is when we are in our thirties or forties and our friends die.
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I have enormous pride in the survival of the Jewish people, the cultural heritage of the Jewish people, but I'm not observant, and I don't belong to a synagogue. I don't go to temple on high holy days, but I'm proud to be Jewish.
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You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.
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I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
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Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.
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Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.