Quotes from Erica Jong

if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Women in America read 'lifestyle' pages which are really glorifications of shopping. They teach us we must veil ourselves in make-up to be loved. And we willingly take the veil, thinking ourselves freed by it. Make-up is no more optional for us than the veil is for Arab women: it is our Western version of the chador.

A person's not free if their freedom has to be given.

Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.

It is hard to open yourself to someone who might really love you. I kept trying to drive Ken away and he kept passing the test by staying.

For what angry God arching backward over the world. his anus spitting fire, the fetid breath of his mouth propelling blood-colored clouds, his navel full of burnt pitch and singed feathers, have we given our eyes, our teeth, our eyeglasses, bales of our our hair, and the magic of our worthless gold?

Blush like you mean it

The astounding energy of post-menopausal women (promised by Margaret Mead) is here, but the optimism to fuel it is not. The world seems ever more surely in the grip of materialism and surfaces. Image, image, image is all it sees. As an image, I'm definitely getting blurry.

It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American.

I know that love is no cure, but rather the disease itself.

At times I hardly can believe in you. Except this ache, this longing in my gut, this emptiness which theorizes you because if there is emptiness this deep, there must be fullness somewhere.

Human beings are naturally hierarchical beasts. Democracy is not their native religion.

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.

God is not dead but missing in action, and we are destined to wander again for more millennia than there are undiscovered stars.

November and the sun grows sparse in the sky.

At thirty-nine, I learned how to change a tyre, how to shovel snow, how to stack wood. I learned how to meet a deadline without a shoulder to whine on. I became obsessed with firewood. If only there was alsways a fire in the fireplace, I knew that everything would be all right. (Prometheus must have been a women. I reverted to my ancient nature: inventing fire all day, having my liver plucked out all night.)

La verdad es que las fantasías, fantasías son y una no puede vivir extasiada todos los días del año. Incluso si das un portazo y te largas, incluso si jodes con todo el mundo a la vista, no te acercas más a la libertad necesariamente.

I loved Aphrodite from the first and steeped myself in her legends. My mother told me that in ancient times her rituals were bloody and cruel, but I only half believed it.

What we remember lacks the hard edge of fact. To help us along we create little fictions, highly subtle and individual scenarios which clarify and shape our experience. The remembered event becomes a fiction, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings. This is obvious to me. If it weren't for these structures, art would be too personal for the artist to create, much less for the audience to grasp. Even film, the most literal of all the arts, is edited. —Jerzy Kosinski

Your love, a sword made of moonlight and blood.

Because When you write about people, you inevitably offend--but if you write about animals, the evil do not recognize themselves but the good understand immediately.

The truth is we all want to be known. And we're simultaneously afraid of it. We want to be unmasked, and the person who can unmask us wins our respect.

Nothing human was worth denying. Even if it was unspeakably ugly, we could learn from it, couldn't we? Or could we? I never questioned that at all.

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 vulnerability. No wonder I had gone from man to man and always wound up married. How could I have left Bennett? How could I have forgotten?