It’s easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.
ERICA JONGI 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.
More Erica Jong Quotes
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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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Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth)
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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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I don’t think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.
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If we can be sufficient unto ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs.
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Really true intimacy is rare and it depends on other things besides sex.
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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.
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The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton’s first law of jealousy.
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The trick is not how much pain you feel – but how much joy you feel
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Images are … a kind of emotional shorthand.
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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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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.
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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.
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What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not exhortation.
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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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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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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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Don’t ye know that ev’ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?
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Courage is the only Magic worth having.
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Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can’t function without it.
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The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.
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Of all the foolish Fears of Humankind, Fear of the Future is by far the most foolish.
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Our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.
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It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.
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You can’t be creative and still be a good girl.
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I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.
ERICA JONG