Erica Jong - Life Quotes

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Someday every woman will have orgasms — like every family has color TV — and we can all get on with the business of life.

Erica Jong
All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.

Erica Jong
Never follow a dog act. You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life.

Erica Jong
Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.

Erica Jong
You don't get to choose what you get famous for and you don't get to control which of your life's many struggles gets to stand for you.

Erica Jong
We need poetry most at those moments when life astounds us with losses, gains, or celebrations. We need it most when we are most hurt, most happy, most downcast, most jubilant. Poetry is the language we speak in times of greatest need. And the fact that it is an endangered species in our culture tells us that we are in deep trouble.

Erica Jong
I've kept journals at many times in my life starting from when I was about 13 or 14. But it's boring and contrived to keep a journal every day. Better to write as the mood strikes.

Erica Jong
Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.

Erica Jong
When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.

Erica Jong
I'm just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion.

Erica Jong
Everything we need is happening within us. The focus on reports of others is only a distraction from the needs of our own spirit. Addiction grows fat from our chronic quashing of the inner life. We believe the spiritual does not exist because we have made insufficient space for it to manifest in our lives.

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
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
Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.

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

Erica Jong
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.

Erica Jong
Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.

Erica Jong
How could one create life with someone who represented death?

Erica Jong
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.

Erica Jong
Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

Erica Jong