Erica Jong - Fear of Flying (1973)

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Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.

Erica Jong
Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old.

Erica Jong
I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?

Erica Jong
There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh.

Erica Jong
As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn't care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.

Erica Jong
The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns all the shades of the rainbow and stops aching. We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think this one is better, because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before.

Erica Jong
It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper.

Erica Jong
I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erica Jong
It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.

Erica Jong
Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture.... Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

Erica Jong
I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like "fidelity" and "adultery", by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that I had him I'd be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.

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

Erica Jong
Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground.

Erica Jong
There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.

Erica Jong
Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.

Erica Jong
The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job.

Erica Jong
Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love...

Erica Jong
Dancing is like fucking... it doesn't matter how you look - just concentrate on how you feel.

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.

Erica Jong
I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps.We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves !

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