Erica Jong

Having a baby with him meant marrying that face forever.

— Erica Jong

All people believe their suffering is greater than others.

— Erica Jong

Humor is a survival tool.

— Erica Jong

How could one create life with someone who represented death?

— Erica Jong

Inevitably, I drank too much, talked too much, smiled too hard, swallowed back too much bile.

— Erica Jong

My body was flesh, which was only one step removed from shit, from clay, from dust.

— Erica Jong

Keeping a journal implies hope.

— Erica Jong

The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach.

— Erica Jong

And what if I don't want forgiveness?

— Erica Jong

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't...

— Erica Jong

Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends.

— Erica Jong

It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.

— Erica Jong

They all cheat sooner or later. You might as well have one who isn't a bore the rest of the time.

— Erica Jong

...jealousy makes the prick grow harder. And the cunt wetter.

— Erica Jong

Love is love, but marriage is an investment.

— Erica Jong

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

— Erica Jong

Without sex it would be so easy to choose appropriate people to live with. Sex was the joker in an otherwise rational deck.

— Erica Jong

Loving someone is a loss of freedom -- but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.

— Erica Jong

There is a rhythm to the ending...

— Erica Jong

Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage -- however often we are hurt as a result of it.

— Erica Jong

If you apologize for something that isn't your fault in the first place, you, in effect, confirm their belief that it is your fault.

— Erica Jong

Photographs... are the most curious indicators of reality.

— Erica Jong

...the ocean kept falling into itself, gathering itself up, and falling into itself again.

— Erica Jong

When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.

— Erica Jong

The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.

— Erica Jong

What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to deceive?

— Erica Jong

I only know that in our choice of friends and lovers and teachers who will change our lives, we are guided by forces which have nothing to do with the rationalizations we give.

— Erica Jong

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.

— Erica Jong

Pain is not love. Love flowers; love gives without taking; love is serene and calm.

— Erica Jong

Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye...

— Erica Jong

Betrayal does that -- betrays the betrayer.

— Erica Jong

It is our old love I love.

— Erica Jong

In loving life you love what can't survive...

— Erica Jong

Why does life need evidence of life?

— Erica Jong

I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound.

— Erica Jong

...I am sure that when we love we are better than ourselves and when we hate, worse.

— Erica Jong

The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.

— Erica Jong

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry...

— Erica Jong

Since flesh can't stay, we pass the words along.

— Erica Jong

Hate generalizes; love is particular.

— Erica Jong

Because I loved myself, I was loved.

— Erica Jong

...if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

— Erica Jong

Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

— Erica Jong

I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.

— Erica Jong

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.

— Erica Jong

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.

— Erica Jong

I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.

— Erica Jong

When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.

— Erica Jong

In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving - instead of actually getting up and leaving.

— Erica Jong

The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.

— Erica Jong

Solitude is un-American.

— Erica Jong

Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love...

— Erica Jong

Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound.

— Erica Jong

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.

— Erica Jong

Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.

— Erica Jong

I'm just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion.

— Erica Jong

Dancing is like fucking... it doesn't matter how you look - just concentrate on how you feel.

— Erica Jong

The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job.

— Erica Jong

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.

— Erica Jong

Sheer bitchiness can be a sort of style.

— Erica Jong

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

Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world.

— Erica Jong

Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.

— Erica Jong

I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world...

— Erica Jong