Quotes by Erica Jong

“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, riskin...”

“I have accepted fear as part of life specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back....”

“We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.”

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

“the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is gods messenger.”

“Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married.”

“We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box.”

“Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.”

“The virtues about marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thoug...”

“Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.”

“Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.”

“Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.”

“Most people in this country are looking for literature that is useful. They feel that just exploring their feelings is good enough - they should be reading about leveraged buy-outs or how to get th...”

“I had forgotten how awful it was to be a woman alone--the leering glances, the catcalls, the offers of help which you dared not accept for fear of incurring a sexual debt. The awful sense of vulner...”

“I don't believe what you believe," I yelled, "and I don't respect your beliefs and I don't respect you for holding them. If you can honestly make a statement like that about the power behind the th...”

“What all the ads and whoreoscopes seemed to imply was that if only you were narcissistic enough, if only you took proper care of your smells, your har, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, you...”

“When women have so absorbed the disease of sexism that they themselves can inflict it on each other, we clearly have a perfect, self-replenishing machine for the continuation of sexism. Unable to t...”

“Why are women so ungenerous to other women? Is it because we have been tokens for so long? Or is there a deeper animosity we owe it to ourselves to ex”

“Naomi Wolf dares to explode the myth of 'victim feminism' and pleads for allowing women to be as full of good and bad desires as men, as avid for sexual fulfilment and power as men, but held back b...”

“Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.”