Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Erica Jong
79 quotes
“I look forward and see myself look back.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In loving life you love what can't survive...”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why does life need evidence of life?”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...I am sure that when we love we are better than ourselves and when we hate, worse.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry...”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since flesh can't stay, we pass the words along.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hate generalizes; love is particular.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because I loved myself, I was loved.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For women writers the systematic discouragement even to attempt to become writers has been so constant and pervasive a force that we cannot consider their literary productions without somehow assessing the effects of that barrage of discouragement.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“school is a microcosm of our society's values.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sexism is somewhat better hidden now-though it is far from eradicated.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“when I go to read my work at colleges, I find the students reading and discussing contemporary writing by women as if there never had been a time when a Distinguished Critic could say "Women can't be writers"-even in jest. I am grateful and glad for that change, but it has not been won without pain.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing is more destructive of the spirit and ultimately of creativity than false meekness, anger that does not know its own name. And nothing is more freeing for a woman (or for a woman writer) than giving up the pleasures of masochism and beginning to fight. But we must always remember that fighting is only a first step. As Virginia Woolf points out in A Room of One's Own, many women's books have been destroyed by the rage and bitterness at their own centers. Rage opens the doors into the spirit, but then the spirit must be nurtureed.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The myths about women were mostly ways of keeping us out of touch with our own strength, and this confused many generations of women.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“when I look back on the years since I left college, and I try to sum up what I have learned, it is precisely that: not to fear change, not to expect my life to be immutable.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every poem, every page of fiction I have written, has been written with anxiety, occasionally panic, always uncertainty about its reception.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a writer, I feel that the very source of my inspiration lies in my never forgetting how much I have in common with other women, how many ways in which we are all-successful or not-similarly shackled. I do not write about superwomen who have transcended all conflict; I write about women who are torn, as most of us are torn, between the past and the future, between our mothers' frustrations and the extravagant hopes we have for our daughters. I do not know what a writer would write about if all her characters were superwomen, cleansed of conflict. Conflict is the soul of literature.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would like to see a world in which male writers wrote without masculinist bias, in which for example Hemingway's masculinist mythology (and that of many other contemporary American male writers) was perceived as quite as bizarre and hysterical as the most absurd excesses of militant feminist fiction, and in which consciousness had become so truly androgynous that the adjective itself would be puzzlingly obsolete.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The human need for companionship and sexuality is far stronger than any intellectual theory”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Righteousness has no place in literature. Of course the keen observer of her culture will feel deeply about the oppression she sees around her, the inhumanity of man to man, of man to woman, but her vision of it must be essentially personal, not abstractly political.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My job is not to paralyze myself by anticipating judgment but to do the best I can and let the judgment fall where it may.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never follow a dog act. You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Erica Jong's father (a musician, songwriter and later business man), his two pieces of advice for her. Given in the Times Literary Supplement, 7 October 1994, page 44.
“For women writers the systematic discouragement even to attempt to become writers has been so constant and pervasive a force that we cannot consider their literary productions without somehow assessing the effects of that barrage of discouragement. Often discouraged in the home, often at school, often by families and spouses, the rare woman writer who does not lose her determination along the way is already a survivor. That one should next have to face the systematic discouragement of a male-oriented literary establishment is absurd and sad but nonetheless a real fact of life for many women writers.* (No one has chronicled this repression better than Tillie Olsen in her splendid book Silences (1978).) The truth is that many of us are doomed to do our best work in an atmosphere of condescension and loneliness. Yet perhaps there is some sense in which that lack of establishment approval is a blessing, for an artist must learn (the sooner the better) that he or she works for the work itself, not for approval, and it is easier to establish that sense of creative independence when approval is lacking than when one is seduced by it.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I must gratefully acknowledge that the second wave of the feminist movement liberated my writing and was a liberating influence upon my whole life. How? Not by supplying me with dogma, but by making it easier for me to look into myself and assume that what I felt as a woman was also shared by other women (and men). For one of the most positive by-products of the so-called second wave of the feminist movement was its discovery of a new audience of readers-readers both female and male-who came to realize that literary history as we previously knew it was the history of the literature of the white, the affluent, the male, and that the female side of experience had been almost completely omitted (except as seen through the eyes of the traditional victors in the war between the sexes-men).”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seems to me that having now created an entire literature of female rage, an entire literature of female introspection, women writers are ready to enter the next phase-the phase of empathy. Without forgetting how hard-won our rage was, without forgetting how many puritanical voices would still like to censor our sexuality, I think we must consider ourselves free to explore the whole world of feeling in our writings-and not to be trapped forever in the phase of discovering buried anger...The time has come to let go of that rage; the time has come to realize that curiosity is braver than rage, that exploration is a nobler calling than war.”
Erica Jong (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source