Top 350 Erica Jong Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “In a world not made for women, criticism and ridicule follow us all the days of our lives. Usually they are indications that we are doing something right.”

— Erica Jong

202. “Every time women make tremendous strides, the right wing gets terrified and creates laws making it hard to get an abortion or birth control.”

— Erica Jong

203. “Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry...”

— Erica Jong

204. “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

205. “You reach a point in life where you realize that you might as well do what you need to do, because your being loved or not being loved is really a function of the people you encounter and not of yourself. That is an immensely liberating insight.”

— Erica Jong

206. “Often I find that poems predict what I’m going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.”

— Erica Jong

207. “Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.”

— Erica Jong

208. “Don’t ye know that ev’ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?”

— Erica Jong

209. “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

210. “Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it’s braver to die old.”

— Erica Jong

211. “I could become servile, cloying, saccharinely sweet: the whole package of lies that passes in the world as femininity.”

— Erica Jong

212. “A baby’s mother also needs a mother.”

— Erica Jong

213. “I can live without it all – love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.”

— Erica Jong

214. “People in the land of LaLa look like expensive wax fruit. And they work hard to achieve that look.”

— Erica Jong

215. “There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul.”

— Erica Jong

216. “It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.”

— Erica Jong

217. “Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down – revising and embellishing as I go. I’m always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.”

— Erica Jong

218. “Tears are a form of communication – like speech – and require a listener.”

— Erica Jong

219. “There is still the feeling that women’s writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.”

— Erica Jong

220. “It takes a spasm of love to write a poem.”

— Erica Jong

221. “I believe that there’s a force of life in the universe, and that when we’re writing or making music or painting, we’re likely to connect with that flow.”

— Erica Jong

222. “No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.”

— Erica Jong

223. “Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That’s one reason old men can send them to war.”

— Erica Jong

224. “Most sex doesn’t really bring people together. You have to reach a certain level of connection, I think, and that’s pretty rare.”

— Erica Jong

225. “Men have always detested women’s gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.”

— Erica Jong

226. “I’m very dependant. I fall apart regularly.”

— Erica Jong

227. “Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.”

— Erica Jong

228. “I mostly hate organized religion, which I think is a force for the oppression of women and creates warfare.”

— Erica Jong

229. “People don’t complete us. We complete ourselves. If we haven’t the power to complete ourselves, the search for love becomes a search for self-annihilation; and then we try to convince ourselves that self-annihilation is love.”

— Erica Jong

230. “Murky language means someone wants to pick your pocket.”

— Erica Jong

231. “It’s horrible getting older. I mean, it’s wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it’s horrible losing your looks.”

— Erica Jong

232. “Love is love, but marriage is an investment.”

— Erica Jong

233. “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

234. “You’re not too fat; you’re just in the wrong country.”

— Erica Jong

235. “All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean – then fall in. But we also write the life raft.”

— Erica Jong

236. “Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting ‘Hiawatha’ and they groan.”

— Erica Jong

237. “Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.”

— Erica Jong

238. “I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It’s amazing. They don’t see any stigma attached to it. We don’t need a man to prove our identity anymore.”

— Erica Jong

239. “Is a currency worth anything if no one wants it? We used to buy shoes in Italy. Remember?”

— Erica Jong

240. “Because I loved myself, I was loved.”

— Erica Jong

241. “As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn’t care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.”

— Erica Jong

242. “Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.”

— Erica Jong

243. “Men must be stripped of arrogance and women must become independent for any mutually nurturing alliance to endure between the sexes.”

— Erica Jong

244. “Faith is the Knowledge of the Heart, Logick the Knowledge of the Mind.”

— Erica Jong

245. “Courage is the only Magic worth having.”

— Erica Jong

246. “Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?”

— Erica Jong

247. “I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.”

— Erica Jong

248. “One writes not by will but by surrender.”

— Erica Jong

249. “Is perception equivalent to existence?”

— Erica Jong

250. “I don’t believe what you believe,” I yelled, “and I don’t respect your beliefs and I don’t respect you for holding them. If you can honestly make a statement like that about the power behind the throne, how can you possibly understand anything about me or the things I’m struggling with? I don’t want to live by the things you live by, I don’t want that kind of life and I don’t see why I should be judged by its standards.”

— Erica Jong