Men have always detested women’s gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Gossip
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. … It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Love, Risk, Risk-taking, Romance
Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Money, Misery
To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Names, Identity
Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Men
Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Gossip
Isn’t that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion? All the cosmetics names seemed obscenely obvious to me in their promises of sexual bliss. They were all firming or uplifting or invigorating. They made you tingle. Or glow. Or feel young. They were prepared with hormones or placentas or royal jelly. All the juice and joy missing in the lives of these women were to be supplied by the contents of jars and bottles. No wonder they would spend twenty dollars for an ounce of face makeup or thirty for a half-ounce of hormone cream. What price bliss? What price sexual ecstasy?
—Erica Jong
Topics: Women
Men and women, women and men; it will never work.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Women, Men & Women, Men
Solitude is un-American.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Solitude, America
In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving—instead of actually getting up and leaving.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Friends and Friendship
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 my heart that says: turn back, turn back, you’ll die if you venture too far.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Fear, Resolve, Courage, Acceptance, Anxiety, Change, Moving on, Endurance, Perseverance
Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Marriage
I was afraid to write “Fear of Flying”; ergo, I had to write it. I have lived my life according to this principle: If I’m afraid of it, then I must do it.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Fear, Anxiety
There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship—only backward. 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. The death has occurred much earlier.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Marriage
Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to nurture it in solitude and to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Talent, Courage, Ability
My reaction to porn films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first 20 minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Pornography
A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Reading
Every time I catch myself saying, “Oh no, you shouldn’t try that,” I think, “Yes, I should.”
—Erica Jong
Topics: Trying
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Feminism
Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Housework
Betrayal does that—betrays the betrayer.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Betrayal, One liners
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer, but wish we didn’t.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Advice, Wishes
I know some good marriages—marriages where both people are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Giving, Service, Kindness
No one to blame! That was why most people led lives they hated, with people they hated. How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one’s nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right. You may be fragmented, but you feel absolved of all the blame for it. Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Being True to Yourself, Responsibility, Confidence, Self-reliance, Blame
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
Topics: Women
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
Topics: America, Women
Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.
—Erica Jong
And what is laughter anyway? Changing the angle of vision. That is what you love a friend for: the ability to change your angle of vision, bring back your best self when you feel worst, remind you of your strengths when you feel weak.
—Erica Jong
It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Courage, Risk, Danger
I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged … I had poems which were rewritten so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Perseverance, Endurance, Resolve
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Sheryl Sandberg American Executive, Author
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Toni Morrison American Novelist
- Robin Morgan American Author
- Willa Cather American Novelist
- Emma Goldman American Anarchist
- Emma Lazarus American Poet, Writer
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Bernard Malamud American Novelist
- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Indian-born American Novelist
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