Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Erica Jong
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 26
Author
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
New York City
New York
Erica Mann Jong
Parent
Assert
Jobs
Previous
Different
Discover
Every
Generation
Later
Generations
Parents
Appalled
Duty
Dismayed

More quotes by Erica Jong

Image
When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.
Erica Jong
Image
I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.
Erica Jong
Image
I've become more conservative about sex as I've gotten older.
Erica Jong
Image
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
Image
A baby's mother also needs a mother.
Erica Jong
Image
As yet we use our media only for selling things - including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls?
Erica Jong
Image
Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
Erica Jong
Image
Harriet van Horne He makes love to me expertly, mechanically, coldly... He's pressing all my buttons, as if I were a pocket calculator.
Erica Jong
Image
The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.
Erica Jong
Image
I actually think leaving your children alone to fantasize, to write, to make projects on their own is good for them. Breathing down their necks is a form of control. Children should have their own space.
Erica Jong
Image
Writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.
Erica Jong
Image
The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.
Erica Jong
Image
What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.
Erica Jong
Image
A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.
Erica Jong
Image
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
Erica Jong
Image
what was time but a convention, a habit of mind, a custom of dress?
Erica Jong
Image
I am not quite sure how writing changes things, but I know that it does. It is indirect-like the trails of earthworms aerating the earth. It is not always deliberate-like the tails of glowing dust dragged by comets.
Erica Jong
Image
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.
Erica Jong
Image
We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.
Erica Jong
Image
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