It takes a spasm of love to write a poem. - Erica Jong

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.

I must gratefully acknowledge that the second wave of the feminist movement liberated my writing and was a liberating influence upon my whole life. How? Not by supplying me with dogma, but by making it easier for me to look into myself and assume that what I felt as a woman was also shared by other women (and men). For one of the most positive by-products of the so-called second wave of the feminist movement was its discovery of a new audience of readers-readers both female and male-who came to realize that literary history as we previously knew it was the history of the literature of the white, the affluent, the male, and that the female side of experience had been almost completely omitted (except as seen through the eyes of the traditional victors in the war between the sexes-men).

...the ocean kept falling into itself, gathering itself up, and falling into itself again.