It’s easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.
ERICA JONGBefore 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.
More Erica Jong Quotes
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Divorce is my generation’s coming of age ceremony – a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.
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 -
What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not exhortation.
ERICA JONG -
Fear is a sign-usually a sign that I’m doing something right.
ERICA JONG -
You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.
ERICA JONG -
Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.
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 -
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 -
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.
ERICA JONG -
Love is love, but marriage is an investment.
ERICA JONG -
What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.
ERICA JONG -
It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.
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 -
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
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