Erica Jong Quotes
-
Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.
-
What all the ads and whorescopes seemed to imply was that if only you took proper care of your smells, your hair, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, your choice of Scotch in bars - you would meet a beautiful powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat (or stand still), make you misty, and fly you to the moon (preferably on gossamer wings), where you would live totally satisfied forever.
-
Faith is the Knowledge of the Heart, Logick the Knowledge of the Mind.
-
I don't believe in organized religion. I believe that people should try to connect with their own life force and let it lead them to do with their lives what they will find satisfying.
-
Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.
-
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.
-
Being a daughter is only half the equation; bearing one is the other.
-
Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.
-
We don't have a clear path forward, and that's been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.
-
Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!
-
Hate generalizes; love is particular.
-
What makes a Man love Death, Fanny? Is it because he hopes to avert his own by watchin' the Deaths of others? Doth he hope to devour Death by devourin' Executions with his Eyes? I'll ne'er understand it, if I live to be eight hundred Years. The Human Beast is more Beast than Human, 'tis true.
-
Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
-
Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.
-
Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.
-
There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.
-
I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.
-
In a world not made for women, criticism and ridicule follow us all the days of our lives. Usually they are indications that we are doing something right.
-
We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.
-
People always think that history proceeds in a straight line. It doesn't. Social attitudes don't change in a straight line. There's always a backlash against progressive ideas.
-
I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.
-
The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.
-
The unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.
-
It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.