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 | 1,345 visits |
Quotations
| • | You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy. 19 |
| • | Faith is the Knowledge of the Heart, Logic the Knowledge of the Mind. 7 |
| • | Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough. 5 |
| • | Betrayal betrays the betrayer. 5 |
| • | And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more. 5 |
| • | Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. 5 |
| • | What is the arc of the plot of one's life? “I want! I want!” 4 |
| • | Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. 4 |
| • | A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage. 3 |
| • | Human beings are naturally hierarchical beasts. Democracy is not their native religion. |
| • | I discovered the secret of writing: live in the present moment. Do not fantasize about possible response because you cannot know the future. |
| • | Beware of the man who wants to protect you; he will protect you from everything but himself. |
| • | 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. |
| • | I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged. |
| • | The Greeks – who knew everything – knew that immortality without youth was to be feared rather than desired. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Women are the only group in history to be idealized into powerlessness. |
| • | We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box. |
| • | 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. |
| • | 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. |
| • | 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. |
| • | 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.... |
| • | Someday every woman will have orgasms – like every family has color TV – and we can all get on with the business of life. |
| • | We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate. |
| • | Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are. |
| • | 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. |
| • | “Without the gods, how would I sing?” I asked. “With your own voice,” he said. |
| • | “But if the gods do not exist at all - then we are lost,” I said. “On the contrary – we are found!” said Aesop. |
| • | Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it. |
| • | Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything. |
| • | Men have always detested women‘’s gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared. |
| • | Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world. |
| • | 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. |
| • | The body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger. |
| • | Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly. |
| • | Tears are a form of communication – like speech – and require a listener. |
| • | 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. |
| • | 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. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Aphrodite’s laughter shakes the sky. |
| • | Did I want to dance? Of course I did and that's not all. |
| • | And what is laughter anyway? Changing the angle of vision. |
| • | 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. |
| • | A person’s not free if their freedom has to be “given”. |
| • | God is not dead but missing in action, and we are destined to wander again for more millennia than there are undiscovered stars. |
| • | It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American. |
| • | Conflict is the soul of literature. |
| • | Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Courage is the only Magic worth having. |
| • | And what if I don't want forgiveness? |
| • | Humor is one of the most serious tools we have for dealing with impossible situations. |
| • | 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. |
| • | The soul is awakened through service. |
| • | Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. |
| • | Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality. |
| • | Because I loved myself, I was loved. |
| • | Love is love, but marriage is an investment. |
| • | There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage. |
| • | The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Really true intimacy is rare and it depends on other things besides sex. |
| • | Home is where your books are. |
| • | Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends. |
| • | It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them. |
| • | Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness. |
| • | 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. |
| • | One writes not by will but by surrender. |
| • | Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child. |
| • | 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. |
| • | The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past. |
| • | Murky language means someone wants to pick your pocket. |
| • | Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right. |
| • | Women who bear children before they establish serious habits of work, may never establish them at all. |
| • | Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads. |
| • | Jealousy is all the fun you think they had. |
| • | I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it. |
| • | Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man. |
| • | Anger is really disappointed hope. |
| • | The truth is: nobody bothers to kill poets in America. It's enough to buy them in universities. Undead. |
| • | Being loved by the world is no substitute for having been loved by one person when you were small. |
