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

More quotes by 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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... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
Erica Jong
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The trick is not how much pain you feel--but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.
Erica Jong
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Most sex is not really intimate.
Erica Jong
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All people believe their suffering is greater than others.
Erica Jong
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Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.
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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It is for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write.
Erica Jong
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How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one's nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.
Erica Jong
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We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion.
Erica Jong
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Don't ye know that ev'ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?
Erica Jong
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the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.
Erica Jong
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The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.
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 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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Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn't good, it wasn't poetry. It was that simple.
Erica Jong
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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.
Erica Jong
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I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.
Erica Jong
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If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.
Erica Jong
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It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.
Erica Jong