I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.
ERICA JONGIf 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.
More Erica Jong Quotes
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Because I loved myself, I was loved.
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Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.
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Keeping a journal implies hope.
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Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.
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Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
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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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As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid – as if we’d disabled them utterly.
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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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The trick is not how much pain you feel–but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain.
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Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.
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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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Courage is the only Magic worth having.
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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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Loving someone is a loss of freedom – but one doesn’t think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
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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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And what if I don’t want forgiveness?
ERICA JONG -
A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
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You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.
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There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.
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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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Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.
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I have accepted fear as a part of life – specifically the fear of change… I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.
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Conflict is the soul of literature.
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I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.
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The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.
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Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.
ERICA JONG