I knew I was in England by the smell. Erica Jong More Quotes by Erica Jong More Quotes From Erica Jong To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives. Erica Jong wife husband names When you start having lunch and actually eating, it's already over. Erica Jong lunch eating love I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man? Erica Jong plugs invention men If we don't risk anything, we risk even more. Erica Jong risk ifs We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe. Erica Jong oxygen writing giving My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction. Erica Jong female-writers generations fiction I had been a feminist all my life, but the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with you unappeasable hunger for male bodies. Erica Jong feminism males feminist I didn't believe in systems. Everything human was imperfect and ultimately absurd. What did I believe in then? In humor. In laughing at systems, at people, at one's self. In laughing even at one's need to laugh all the time. In seeing life as contradictory, many-sided, various, funny, tragic, and with moments of outrageous beauty. In seeing life as a fruitcake, including delicious plums and bad peanuts, but meant to be devoured hungrily all the same because you couldn't feast on the plums without also sometimes being poisoned by the peanuts. Erica Jong self laughing believe Plot is just a fancy way of saying 'and then. Erica Jong fancy plot way The desire for magic cannot be eradicated. Even the most supposedly rational people attempt to practice magic in love and war. We simultaneously possess the most primitive of brain stems and the most sophisticated of cortices. The imperatives of each coexist uneasily. Erica Jong practice war people Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express. Erica Jong self secret dream Coupling doesn't always have to do with sex ... Two people holding each other up like flying buttresses. Two people depending on each other and babying each other and defending each other against the world outside. Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world. Erica Jong two sex people we write as if our lives depended upon it. They do. Erica Jong our-lives ifs writing Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree. Erica Jong degrees house home 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 funeral insane people Sex is God's joke on the human race ... if we didn't have sex to make us ridiculous, She would have had to think up something else instead. Erica Jong race sex thinking In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap, our empathy for others as an excuse to underpay us. Erica Jong divorce motherhood passion Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists; / he is afraid. Erica Jong psychiatry he-man men Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover. Erica Jong real sweet sex It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. Erica Jong white two years
