Quote

Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can't function without it.

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
Believe
Unhappiness
Element
Function
Elements
Come
Without

More quotes by Erica Jong

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I don't believe in organized religion. I believe that people should try to connect with their own life force and let it lead them to do with their lives what they will find satisfying.
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You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.
Erica Jong
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Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
Erica Jong
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There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage.
Erica Jong
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Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do. It's really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or what your audience needs.
Erica Jong
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Souls have neither Sex nor Colour.
Erica Jong
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A baby's mother also needs a mother.
Erica Jong
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I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.
Erica Jong
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Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
Erica Jong
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If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair.
Erica Jong
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certain very old people reach an age where every funeral becomes some sort of insane confirmation of strength, rather than of vulnerability, as it is when we are in our thirties or forties and our friends die.
Erica Jong
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Isn't it our job to be appalled by our parents? Isn't it every generation's duty to be dismayed by the previous generation? And to assert that we are different - only to discover later that we are distressingly the same?
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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Good sex is a mystery. Perhaps humping and pumping is not a mystery, but good sex is a mystery, and how human beings become truly intimate remains a mystery.
Erica Jong
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Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion?
Erica Jong
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This is the sad bed of chosen chastity because you are miles and mountains away.
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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Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
Erica Jong
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Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.
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