Quote

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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Erica Jong
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 26
Author
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
New York City
New York
Erica Mann Jong
Silence
Drives
Head
Voices
Voice
Guilt
Makes
Instruments
Viciously
Seems
Deeper
Accuse
Ever
Ground
Blunt
Outside
Hammer
Inside
Hammers

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Is there a phrase in the English language more fraught with menace than a tax audit?
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Is perception equivalent to existence?
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At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.
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A baby's mother also needs a mother.
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Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!
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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.
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Ken, my husband, just smelled like he belonged to me. I'm not talking about hygiene. I'm talking about when you hug him, he either feels like a member of your tribe or not. It's their scent.
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Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.
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We all parent the best we can. Being human, we're ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.
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Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
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The problem with feminism in the second wave was that we fought so much among ourselves, and I think we did so much damage to the movement... and I think the next wave, the third wave, is women mentoring younger women and women helping younger women to enter the political process and the writing world.
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I've become more conservative about sex as I've gotten older.
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we need poetry most at those moments when life astounds us with losses, gains, or celebrations. We need it most when we are most hurt, most happy, most downcast, most jubilant. Poetry is the language we speak in times of greatest need. And the fact that it is an endangered species in our culture tells us that we are in deep trouble.
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Great loves have legs and wings. They are substantial. They do not dissapate so easily... Great loves have staying power. Or so I told myself.
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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.
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I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
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I have a very sensitive nose. I identify with dogs. I understand the world through my nose.
Erica Jong
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You can't be creative and still be a good girl.
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.
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This is the sad bed of chosen chastity because you are miles and mountains away.
Erica Jong