The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton’s first law of jealousy.
ERICA JONGIf 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.
More Erica Jong Quotes
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I don’t think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.
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There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage.
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The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I’m thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho.
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Breast-feeding may succumb to the bottle; cuddling, fondling, and paediatric visits may also be done by fathers…but when a child needs a mother to talk to, nobody else but a mother will do.
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Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.
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What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?
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Betrayal betrays the betrayer.
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Often I find that poems predict what I’m going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.
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If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.
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I don’t know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else’s erotica that you don’t like.
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If we can be sufficient unto ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs.
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And what if I don’t want forgiveness?
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No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.
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Courage is the only Magic worth having.
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The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.
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If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair.
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People are interested in their own sexuality and they’ve always reflected it in their art. End of story.
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Conflict is the soul of literature.
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How could one create life with someone who represented death?
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Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don’t feel any experience is complete unless it’s recorded.
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I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself.
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Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.
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The trick is not how much pain you feel–but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain.
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As long as I’m facing the right direction, it doesn’t matter the size of my steps.
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Is perception equivalent to existence?
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Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.
ERICA JONG