Quotes from Erica Jong

Sometimes it seems both our kids and our parents were smarter than we were. We fell somewhere between our parents' thirties idealism and our kids' eighties cynicism. Somewhere deep down we still believe that all we need is love, love, love. Somewhere deep down we question how we got grey hair. How on earth did we get to be the grown-ups? The wonder is that our kids are growing up -- despite all that we did to destroy them.

The witch is not dead; she is merely hibernating. And witch-hunting itself is hardly dead; it is merely waiting to be born again under a different name.

The Church is seen as a secular organization - a real-estate conglomerate, a powerful lobby for the oppression of women - which has little or nothing to do with spiritual transcendence. It will doubtless seek to ban this book. Less than two hundred and fifty years ago, it would have burned the author.

Perhaps the need to believe in demons is, in itself, the last resort of a mind desperate to project its evils outward.

You did not pick up this book because you were interested in the neo-pagan revival. You picked it up because, from earliest childhood, you, like the author and the artist, have been haunted by - at times possessed by - the figure of the witch. Les us turn now to her. We will find her inside ourselves.

But when we remember that this book was used for centuries as a how-to book for witch-hunters, we can only despair that the printing press has often been a tool of oppression as of liberation.

What is the arc of the plot of one's life? I want! I want!

I wished for you to be born a daughter though we know that daughters cannot but be born for burning like the fatal tree.

The familiars also had the most fanciful of names. Various British witch trials record a gray cat called Tittey, a black toad called Pigin, a black lamb called Tyffin, a black dog called Suckin, and a red lion called Lyerd. There were also assorted imps called Great Dick, Little Dick, Willet, Pluck, Catch, Holt, Jamara, Vinegar Tom, Pyewackett, Grizzel, and Greedigut.

Troubles are the price of adventure.

I am sick of haunting myself from within like an old house. I would be happier as a hunted witch.

Though most of the punished witches were neither propertied nor powerful, the constant reminder of what patriarchal power could do to uppity, solitary, or rebellious women must have gone a long way toward keeping the mass of women in their place.

It is vital that we try to see religious myths not as immutable go- (or goddess-) given truths, but as reflections of human society and fear.

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 thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead.

It is less important whether we worship the holy spirit in the form of a tree, a woman, a man, or an animal than that we do worship and honor it. At the same time, we must accord each other the right to atheism or agnosticism - for religion becomes little more than fascism if it is compelled rather than self-motivated.

The sort of reasoning that would try a woman for murder if she sought an abortion could well lead to renewed witch-hunts.

You did not have to apologize for wanting to own your own soul. Your soul belonged to you—for better or worse. When all was said and done, it was all you had.

We all have our particular preferences. Mine is gentle sex, the kind in which a man takes forever before he touches you down there. But most people are so guilty about sex that they want the crime and the punishment built in.

If some things could change, so could other things. What right had I to predict the future and predict it so nihilistically? As I got older I would probably change in hundreds of ways I couldn't foresee. All I had to do was wait it out.

I went for years not finishing anything because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.

The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men's theories of women. —D. H. Lawrence

If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves!

Kad ne pišemo, mu?e nas takve trivijalne brige u kojima je središnja tema naš ego, ego, ego, pa i kriti?ari govore o toj istoj temi - ego, ego, ego. ?iji potpis? ?ija knjiga? Koja nagrada? Ali, jezik nema odre?enog autora - baš kao što rijeka ne brije ho?e li ostati u nekoj državi.

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.