I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.
ERICA JONGIf we can be sufficient unto ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs.
More Erica Jong Quotes
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And what if I don’t want forgiveness?
ERICA JONG -
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.
ERICA JONG -
I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.
ERICA JONG -
As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid – as if we’d disabled them utterly.
ERICA JONG -
The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.
ERICA JONG -
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.
ERICA JONG -
I don’t think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.
ERICA JONG -
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.
ERICA JONG -
There’s always a backlash against progressive ideas.
ERICA JONG -
Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye.
ERICA JONG -
Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.
ERICA JONG -
The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.
ERICA JONG -
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.
ERICA JONG -
A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.
ERICA JONG -
Images are … a kind of emotional shorthand.
ERICA JONG -
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.
ERICA JONG -
The sexuality doesn’t end. It really doesn’t. You’re sexual your whole life, if you’re a sexual person.
ERICA JONG -
My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.” – Socrates (470-399 B.C.) “Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t
ERICA JONG -
Freedom is a loose leash, license to be different from your mother and still be loved…Freedom is…not insisting that your daughter share your limitations. Freedom also means letting your daughter reject you when she needs to and come back when she needs to. Freedom is unconditional love.
ERICA JONG -
In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap.
ERICA JONG -
Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.
ERICA JONG -
A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
ERICA JONG -
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.
ERICA JONG -
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it.
ERICA JONG -
Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.
ERICA JONG -
I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.
ERICA JONG