Top 430 Quotes & Sayings by Erica Jong - Page 3

Don't ye know that ev'ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?

Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

How could one create life with someone who represented death?

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

And what if I don't want forgiveness?

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.

We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.

They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.

I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage.

In loving life you love what can't survive.

There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.

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.

Fear is a sign-usually a sign that I'm doing something right.

I look forward and see myself look back.

Is perception equivalent to existence?

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. People are interested in their own sexuality and they've always reflected it in their art. End of story.

The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.

Every time I catch myself saying, "Oh no, you shouldn't try that," I think, "Yes, I should."

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.

Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony - a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.

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

Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.

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.

Flesh is merely a lesson. We learn it & pass on.

As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid - as if we'd disabled them utterly. Do all women have to keep silent for men to speak? Do all women have to be legless for men to walk?

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, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us.

I don't think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.

The camera creates a magical transformation. It's not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. ... Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don't feel any experience is complete unless it's recorded.

I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.

Before 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.

If we can be sufficient unto ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs.

There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship, only backward.

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.

Images are ... a kind of emotional shorthand.

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. The parity of women's health. It's very depressing to think that you win these rights, but then you have to win them again, and again, and again, and fight the same battles over and over.

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.

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth) I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.

A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.

Keeping a journal implies hope.

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

It's easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.

Home is where your books are.

Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That's one reason old men can send them to war.

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.

Souls have neither Sex nor Colour.

If you don't have time to do it right you must have time to do it right you must have time to do it over. If you don't know where you are going, how do you know when you get there? If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

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.

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.

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. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.

Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends.

The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.

You can't be creative and still be a good girl.

Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.

The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy.

of all the foolish Fears of Humankind, Fear of the Future is by far the most foolish.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner. Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare

Motherhood cannot finally be delegated. Breast-feeding may succumb to the bottle; cuddling, fondling, and paediatric visits may also be done by fathers...but when a child needs a mother to talk to, nobody else but a mother will do.