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What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.

Erica Jong

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Erica Jong
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 26
Author
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
New York City
New York
Erica Mann Jong
Death
Thanatos
Love
Eros
Sources
Paradox
Beginning
Subjects
Poetry
Source

More quotes by Erica Jong

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Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.
Erica Jong
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Sex doesn't disappear, it just changes forms.
Erica Jong
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Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony - a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.
Erica Jong
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Motherhood cannot finally be delegated. Breast-feeding may succumb to the bottle cuddling, fondling, and paediatric visits may also be done by fathers...but when a child needs a mother to talk to, nobody else but a mother will do.
Erica Jong
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biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
Erica Jong
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I don't cook. My mother didn't cook. My daughter doesn't cook.
Erica Jong
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A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.
Erica Jong
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Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
Erica Jong
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I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.
Erica Jong
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You can't be creative and still be a good girl.
Erica Jong
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When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.
Erica Jong
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There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship, only backward.
Erica Jong
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The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.
Erica Jong
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If you've been a pretty woman and always pursued by lovers, losing that and not having that - it feels like a great loss.
Erica Jong
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The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn't mean you can't exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.
Erica Jong
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... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
Erica Jong
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Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.
Erica Jong
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Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.
Erica Jong
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There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.
Erica Jong
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Venice, that capital city of dream and intrigue, that double city (one above and seemingly solid, one below, wavering and reflected in the waters), which never disappoints.
Erica Jong