Loving someone is a loss of freedom – but one doesn’t think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
ERICA JONGBreast-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.
More Erica Jong Quotes
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Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.
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Love is love, but marriage is an investment.
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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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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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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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I hope we don’t have to keep going back over the same territory and winning the same rights over and over again. The battle for birth control. The battle for abortion.
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Home is where your books are.
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Our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.
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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.
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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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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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Every time I catch myself saying, “Oh no, you shouldn’t try that,” I think, “Yes, I should.”
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Divorce is my generation’s coming of age ceremony – a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.
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Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartednes s that requires the true courage — however often we are hurt as a result of it.
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The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.
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And what if I don’t want forgiveness?
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Images are … a kind of emotional shorthand.
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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.
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My mother wanted me to be her wings, to fly as she never quite had the courage to do. I love her for that. I love the fact that she wanted to give birth to her own wings.
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Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.
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It’s horrible getting older. I mean, it’s wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it’s horrible losing your looks.
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A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.
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There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship, only backward.
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Courage is the only Magic worth having.
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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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Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.
ERICA JONG