And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.
I have accepted fear as a part of life – specifically the fear of change… I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.
The soul is awakened through service.
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
Denounce useless guilt. Don’t make a cult of suffering. Live in the now(or at least the soon). Always do the things you fear most. Courage is an acquired taste like caviar.
I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me
I have lived my life according to this principle: If I’m afraid of it, then I must do it.
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
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
Erica Jong Quotes About Love and Marriage
There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship –only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses
Men and women, women and men. It will never work.
The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.
Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same.
Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.
Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world
In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving – instead of actually getting up and leaving.
We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion.
I don’t think you will ever fully understand how you’ve touched my life and made me who I am. I don’t think you could ever know just how truly special you are that even on the darkest nights you are my brightest star
Great loves have legs and wings. They are substantial. They do not dissipate so easily… Great loves have staying power.
Erica Jong Quotes about Writting
I write lustily and humorously. It isn’t calculated; it’s the way I think. I’ve invented a writing style that expresses who I am.
A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive
I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged…. I had poems which were rewritten so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.
Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart
Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down–revising and embellishing as I go. I’m always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper
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
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
No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.
There is still the feeling that women’s writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.
Other Great Erica Jong Quotes
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.
Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
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
Solitude is un-American.
Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it
Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.
To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual
Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.
Isn’t that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion?
Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture.
Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.
We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.
Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.
Anger is really disappointed hope
It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.
Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life
Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.
Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.
The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers.
Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.
There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes
Betrayal does that — betrays the betrayer.