Erica Jong
American author and educator.
Why does life need evidence of life?
How could one create life with someone who represented death?
They all cheat sooner or later. You might as well have one who isn't a bore the rest of the time.
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.
Having a baby with him meant marrying that face forever.
In loving life you love what can't survive...
Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.
The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.
Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm.
Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love...
Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.
Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.
I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.
Inevitably, I drank too much, talked too much, smiled too hard, swallowed back too much bile.
Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
My body was flesh, which was only one step removed from shit, from clay, from dust.
The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.
And what if I don't want forgiveness?
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't...
There is a rhythm to the ending...