A Quote by Erica Jong

The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel — © Erica Jong
The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel
The trick is not how much pain you feel--but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.
So much of the pain we feel is based on resistance to what we can't change. Allowing yourself to let go and feel how you feel in the moment is a blissful thing.
At the close of life the question will be not how much have you got, but how much have you given; not how much have you won, but how much have you done; not how much have you saved, but how much have you sacrificed; how much have you loved and served, not how much were you honored.
It'll be hard, but life moves fast-we'll see each other again. I know that. I can feel that. Just like I can feel how much you care for me and how much I love you
I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt but I was wrong.
And maybe that was how it was supposed to be...Joy and sadness were part of the package; the trick, perhaps,was to let yourself feel all of it, but to hold on to the joy just a little more tightly.
The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.
Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'
The whole trick is to make it feel like you're spying on real people's lives as they get through the day. When I'm writing, I have to trick myself as a writer. If I consciously say, 'I'm writing,' I feel all this pressure and somehow it doesn't feel as real as when it doesn't seem to count as much.
I thought I could make a sarcastic joke about it. But it's based on my own struggle with how much to give, how much it's really helping or not, and how foolish or not I feel. Giving sometimes backfires.
When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the lies of certain individuals close to me, with the detachment of time. I wanted to tell the truth about secrets: How much pain they give, yet how much relief, even happiness we may feel when at last the motive for secrecy has passed.
I'm supposed to be a christian, but most days I don't feel like I can even presume to say that about myself any longer. I have a lot of mad left over. When I can't sleep, I think about the other people who didn't care how much pain and trouble they caused me. And I think about how good I'd feel if they died.
Never give up, no matter how hard life gets no matter how much pain you feel. Pain will eventually subside, nothing remains forever, so keep going and don't give up.
People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it.
I've spent too much of my life being made to feel like there's something wrong with me. And no matter how much support I felt as a basketball player at Baylor, it still doesn't erase all the pain I felt there.
A lot of people might define a life well lived by how much is in the bank. I feel like it's how much you laugh.
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