Quotes from Erica Jong

But I am wise if not yet quite old, wanting the poem more than the lover, wanting words more than the sticky dew men secrete in their private places.

Mothers and daughters -- it's a comedy, but also a tragedy. We fill our daughters with all the chutzpah we wish for ourselves. We want them to be free as we were not. And then we resent them for being so free. We resent them for being what we have made! With granddaughters, it's so much easier. And great-granddaughters.

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

Even now, we have laryngitis from screaming at each other: the dirty little secret of a durable marriage.

It's impossible to generalize about sexuality - even one's own. The only way to keep it pure is to keep it unspoken. Keep it out of words. Words are not where sexuality lives. Without privacy, there is no ecstasy.

You merely pass the time, making millennia fly by.

Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage-however often we are hurt as a result of it.

A good woman would have given her life to the care and feeding of her husband's madness. I was not a good woman. I had too many other things to do.

women are the only group in history to be idealized into powerlessness

Why should a bad marriage have been so much more compelling than no marriage? Why had I clung to my misery so? Why did I believe it was all I had?

The greatest freedom I have now is that I no longer believe that anyone else can save my life. --Erica Jong, quoted by bell hooks in Communion The Female Search for Love

It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present, how much of daily life is usually spent making plans and attempting to control the future. Never mind that you have no control over it. The idea of the future is our greatest entertainment, amusement, and time-killer.

When one follows the path with heart, one often bleeds. (But what is the alternative—a cauterized core?)

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

I am unimaginably old—fifty. Only witches live to be fifty! Good women die in childbirth at seventeen as I nearly did. By fifty I should be dead or a crone—with my dark looks and my somewhat crooked spine—which I have always disguised with capes of multicolored silk. My youth is gone, but my vanity is not. How can I still dream of love at fifty? I must be mad!

Children are no antidote to loneliness.

If I loved him, would I censor my writing to please him? If I married him, would I force my writing to be married as well?

There's no shame in loving life above death. Otherwise I would be dead. What use would that be to the gods, who will not die themselves?

Y el problema es que si no arriesgas nada, arriesgas aún más.

Few of us realize the extent to which our notions of the deity are informed by patriarchal assumptions. We claim that God is raceless and genderless, yet we visualize God as white and male to such a degree that the very notion of a black, female God is enough to raise guffaws in response to a hardy, perennial joke.

Every woman artist has to kill her own grandmother. She perches on our shoulder whispering, Don't embarrass the family.

once becoming a mother, a woman might be radicalized in her feminism. She had a greater stake in saving the earth from male politicians. She had a greater stake in education and health, in the environment, in all social policy. She finally understood the way our society makes children and mothers the lowers of priorities. ...... I was hardly mellowed by the maternal transformation. If anything, my feminism grew more fierce.

She explains that in the evolution of religions, the god of the old religion always becomes the devil of the new.

Again we are re-minded of the fate of women in patriarchal society. How can we find the truth about their lives when most of the books were written by men?