Erica Jong Quotes

Having a baby with him meant marrying that face forever.

I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly.

The myths about women were mostly ways of keeping us out of touch with our own strength, and this confused many generations of women.

In loving life you love what can't survive...

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry...

For women writers the systematic discouragement even to attempt to become writers has been so constant and pervasive a force that we cannot consider their literary productions without somehow assessing the effects of that barrage of discouragement. Often discouraged in the home, often at school, often by families and spouses, the rare woman writer who does not lose her determination along the way is already a survivor. That one should next have to face the systematic discouragement of a male-oriented literary establishment is absurd and sad but nonetheless a real fact of life for many women writers.* (No one has chronicled this repression better than Tillie Olsen in her splendid book Silences (1978).) The truth is that many of us are doomed to do our best work in an atmosphere of condescension and loneliness. Yet perhaps there is some sense in which that lack of establishment approval is a blessing, for an artist must learn (the sooner the better) that he or she works for the work itself, not for approval, and it is easier to establish that sense of creative independence when approval is lacking than when one is seduced by it.

I look forward and see myself look back.

They all cheat sooner or later. You might as well have one who isn't a bore the rest of the time.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't...

Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness, anger that does not know its own name. And nothing is more freeing for a woman (or for a woman writer) than giving up the pleasures of masochism and beginning to fight. But we must always remember that fighting is only a first step. As Virginia Woolf points out in A Room of One's Own, many women's books have been destroyed by the rage and bitterness at their own centers. Rage opens the doors into the spirit, but then the spirit must be nurtureed.

Since flesh can't stay, we pass the words along.

Sexism is somewhat better hidden now-though it is far from eradicated.

when I look back on the years since I left college, and I try to sum up what I have learned, it is precisely that: not to fear change, not to expect my life to be immutable.

No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool.

What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to deceive?