What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not exhortation.
ERICA JONGThough my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.
More Erica Jong Quotes
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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.
ERICA JONG -
Love is love, but marriage is an investment.
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 -
The trick is not how much pain you feel – but how much joy you feel
ERICA JONG -
Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That’s one reason old men can send them to war.
ERICA JONG -
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.
ERICA JONG -
I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me.
ERICA JONG -
Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.
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 -
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 -
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 -
As long as I’m facing the right direction, it doesn’t matter the size of my steps.
ERICA JONG -
To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.
ERICA JONG -
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.
ERICA JONG -
If we can be sufficient unto ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs.
ERICA JONG -
Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.
ERICA JONG -
Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.
ERICA JONG -
It’s easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.
ERICA JONG -
Every time I catch myself saying, “Oh no, you shouldn’t try that,” I think, “Yes, I should.”
ERICA JONG -
There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship, only backward.
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 -
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.
ERICA JONG -
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 JONG -
Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.
ERICA JONG -
Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.
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