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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, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

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
Life
Inspirational
Cynical
People
Tell
Brave
Anything
Inspiring
Everything
Marriage
Hippi
Even
Worth
Risking
Something
Risk
Subversive
Really
Trouble
Hippie
Love
Fighting
Cracked

More quotes by 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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If there's anything the world disdains more than uppity young women, it's uppity old women. Dying young has always been a woman's best career move.
Erica Jong
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I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
Erica Jong
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Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
Erica Jong
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When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.
Erica Jong
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In a way women are fleshier because of estrogen. It's hard for us to lose weight because when we get super skinny we don't ovulate. Women in camps during the Holocaust didn't menstruate and didn't ovulate. They were starving they were terrified. Why emulate that condition? It's nonsensical to me.
Erica Jong
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Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.
Erica Jong
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The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.
Erica Jong
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Most sex doesn't really bring people together. You have to reach a certain level of connection, I think, and that's pretty rare.
Erica Jong
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Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need them at the times when they need them ... Cosmic forces guide such passings-along.
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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Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.
Erica Jong
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If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.
Erica Jong
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It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.
Erica Jong
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Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.
Erica Jong
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Women who bear children before they establish serious habits of work, may never establish them at all.
Erica Jong
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The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with you and possess that quality of joy.
Erica Jong
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The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel
Erica Jong
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I think I've become more cynical about sex. Meaning, I don't think sex in and of itself leads to an epiphany.
Erica Jong
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Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?
Erica Jong