Erica Jong
American author and educator.
The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.
Loving someone is a loss of freedom -- but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
Keeping a journal implies hope.
Betrayal does that -- betrays the betrayer.
Dancing is like fucking... it doesn't matter how you look - just concentrate on how you feel.
I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound.
Is perception equivalent to existence?
There is a rhythm to the ending...
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't...
And what if I don't want forgiveness?
Hate generalizes; love is particular.
My body was flesh, which was only one step removed from shit, from clay, from dust.
Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
Inevitably, I drank too much, talked too much, smiled too hard, swallowed back too much bile.
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.
Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.
Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.
Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love...
Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm.
The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.