Quotes by
Erica Jong |
1942- , American writer
American novelist, satirist, and poet, known particularly for her best-seller Fear of Flying (1973). The book became controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. | 81 quotes | 2,433 visits |
Quotations
| • | You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy. 21 |
| • | Faith is the Knowledge of the Heart, Logic the Knowledge of the Mind. 8 |
| • | Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. 6 |
| • | And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more. 6 |
| • | Betrayal betrays the betrayer. 6 |
| • | Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough. 6 |
| • | Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. 5 |
| • | What is the arc of the plot of one's life? “I want! I want!” 5 |
| • | A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage. 4 |
| • | Being loved by the world is no substitute for having been loved by one person when you were small. 2 |
| • | The truth is: nobody bothers to kill poets in America. It's enough to buy them in universities. Undead. 1 |
| • | Anger is really disappointed hope. 1 |
| • | Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man. 1 |
| • | I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it. 1 |
| • | Jealousy is all the fun you think they had. 1 |
| • | Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads. 1 |
| • | Women who bear children before they establish serious habits of work, may never establish them at all. 1 |
| • | Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right. 1 |
| • | Murky language means someone wants to pick your pocket. 1 |
| • | The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past. 1 |
| • | As women, we can't look old. We can't be fat. We're supposed to look like the 14-year-old models in Vogue, who are younger and younger and skinnier and skinnier, and they are air-brushed and contoured and Photoshopped. 1 |
| • | Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child. 1 |
| • | One writes not by will but by surrender. 1 |
| • | What is the fatal charm of Italy? What do we find there that can be found nowhere else? I believe it is a certain permission to be human, which other places, other countries, lost long ago. 1 |
| • | Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness. 1 |
| • | It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them. 1 |
| • | Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends. 1 |
| • | Home is where your books are. 1 |
| • | Really true intimacy is rare and it depends on other things besides sex. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself. 1 |
| • | There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage. 1 |
| • | Love is love, but marriage is an investment. 1 |
| • | Because I loved myself, I was loved. 1 |
| • | Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality. 1 |
| • | Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. 1 |
| • | The soul is awakened through service. 1 |
| • | The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultaneously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops - in general, doing everything men do. 1 |
| • | Humor is one of the most serious tools we have for dealing with impossible situations. 1 |
| • | And what if I don't want forgiveness? 1 |
| • | Courage is the only Magic worth having. 1 |
| • | The trick is not how much pain you feel – but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses. 1 |
| • | Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar. 1 |
| • | Conflict is the soul of literature. 1 |
| • | It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American. 1 |
| • | God is not dead but missing in action, and we are destined to wander again for more millennia than there are undiscovered stars. 1 |
| • | A person’s not free if their freedom has to be “given”. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | And what is laughter anyway? Changing the angle of vision. 1 |
| • | Did I want to dance? Of course I did and that's not all. 1 |
| • | Aphrodite’s laughter shakes the sky. 1 |
| • | In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but when it happens, you begin to feel like a whore. The disparity between your life and your work turns out to be as great as ever. And the people seduced by your work are usually seduced by all the wrong reasons. 1 |
| • | We're programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You're supposed to work and suffer – and the trouble is: you believe it. 1 |
| • | There's nothing good about being ordinary. People don't respect you for it. People run after people who are different, who have confidence in their own taste, who don't run with the herd. There is nothing gained by giving in to the pressures of group vulgarity. 1 |
| • | Tears are a form of communication – like speech – and require a listener. 1 |
| • | Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly. 1 |
| • | The body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger. 1 |
| • | You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare. 1 |
| • | Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world. 1 |
| • | Men have always detested women‘’s gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared. 1 |
| • | Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything. 1 |
| • | Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it. 1 |
| • | “But if the gods do not exist at all - then we are lost,” I said. “On the contrary – we are found!” said Aesop. 1 |
| • | “Without the gods, how would I sing?” I asked. “With your own voice,” he said. 1 |
| • | My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live. 1 |
| • | Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are. 1 |
| • | We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate. 1 |
| • | Someday every woman will have orgasms – like every family has color TV – and we can all get on with the business of life. 1 |
| • | I have accepted fear as part of life – specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.... 1 |
| • | If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it’s because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body – and with it your own voice – and that’s the most revolutionary insight of all. 1 |
| • | There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. 1 |
| • | We all have our particular preferences. Mine is gentle sex, the kind in which a man takes forever before he touches you down there. But most people are so guilty about sex that they want the crime and the punishment built in. 1 |
| • | We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box. 1 |
| • | Women are the only group in history to be idealized into powerlessness. 1 |
| • | Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage-however often we are hurt as a result of it. 1 |
| • | The Greeks – who knew everything – knew that immortality without youth was to be feared rather than desired. 1 |
| • | I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged. 1 |
| • | I discovered the secret of writing: live in the present moment. Do not fantasize about possible response because you cannot know the future. 1 |
| • | Beware of the man who wants to protect you; he will protect you from everything but himself. 1 |
| • | Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you ’re going to die anyway. 1 |
| • | Human beings are naturally hierarchical beasts. Democracy is not their native religion. 1 |
