652 Quotes by Erica Jong

The Greeks – who knew everything – knew that immortality without youth was to be feared rather than desired.

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.

Without the gods, how would I sing?? I asked. With your own voice,? he said.

The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton’s first law of jealousy.

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.

Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn’t good, it wasn’t poetry. It was that simple.

If you don’t have time to do it right you must have time to do it right you must have time to do it over. If you don’t know where you are going, how do you know when you get there? If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Is there no Villain in this World who doth not regard himself as a poor abus’d Innocent, no She-Wolf who doth not think herself a Lamb, no Shark who doth not fancy that she is a Goldfish?

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