Erica Jong Quotes

191 Sourced Quotes

If there's anything the world disdains more than uppity young women, it's uppity old women. Dying young has always been a woman's best career move.

Erica Jong
Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage — however often we are hurt as a result of it.

Erica Jong
I am thinking of the onion again.... Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like ripples.

Erica Jong
Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.

Erica Jong
You cannot tell the truth when words are corrupted. Our country was founded on the notion that the plain words of the people are more important than the fancy words of kings.

Erica Jong
Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.

Erica Jong
There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness - her selfishness, in short - is a reproach to the American way of life.

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

Erica Jong
I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world...

Erica Jong
A writer is someone who takes the universal whore of language and turns her into a virgin again.

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

Erica Jong
An artist or writer is a specimen human being who just goes about the world hoping to be a bundle of nerve endings that take in everything and transform it into a voice.

Erica Jong
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. Despair is for those who expect to live forever. I no longer do.

Erica Jong
We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion.

Erica Jong
The most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study...

Erica Jong
I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as a part of life, specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown, and I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back, turn back, you'll die if you venture too far.

Erica Jong
I only know that in our choice of friends and lovers and teachers who will change our lives, we are guided by forces which have nothing to do with the rationalizations we give.

Erica Jong
Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound.

Erica Jong
Biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.

Erica Jong
... if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Erica Jong
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.

Erica Jong
Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.

Erica Jong
We don't expect them to tell the truth about power any more than we expect movie stars to tell the truth about love.

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

Erica Jong
My body was flesh, which was only one step removed from shit, from clay, from dust.

Erica Jong
Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world.

Erica Jong
It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

Erica Jong
At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.

Erica Jong
Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

Erica Jong
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.

Erica Jong