Erica Mann Jong Quotes (22 Quotes)

What all the ads and all the whoreoscopes seemed to imply was that if only you were narcissistic enough, if only you took proper care of your smells, your hair, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, and your choice of Scotch in bars--you would meet a beautiful, powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat (or stand still), make you misty, and fly you to the moon (preferably on gossamer wings), where you would live totally satisfied forever.

Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that one friend in an indifferent world

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.

If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.

The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns all the shades of the rainbow and stops aching. We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think this one is better, because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before.

Will you ever I dont think you will ever fully understand how you've touched my life and made me who I am.I don't think you could ever know just how truly special you are that even on the darkest nights you are my brightest star.

In my view, everything was indeed about her. His romancing me was about her, his conversation about her, his rage about her. Rage is not a good basis for sex. Nor is revenge. He was getting his revenge for his chores. He was getting even with her about things I couldn't even imagine.

I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as part of life specifically fear of change and fear of the unknownand I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says, turn back, turn back, you'll die if you venture too far.

The job of the writer is to seduce the demons of creativity and make up stories. Often you go to bed with a man who claims to be a demon and later you find out he's just an everyday slob.

Back in the days when men were hunters and chest beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid. They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild -- and what happened The men wilted.

We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion

I know some good marriages - marriages where both people are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other

My reaction to porno films is as follows After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw, After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live

Isn't that the problem That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion All the cosmetics names seemed obscenely obvious to me in their promises of sexual bliss. They were all firming or up

Beware of the man who denounces women writers his penis is tiny and he cannot spell.

It made it acceptable for women to seek pleasure, married or not,

There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier.

There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness -- her selfishness, in short -- is a reproach to the American way of life.

The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel

Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.

Life has no plot. It is far more interesting than anything you can say about it because language, by its very nature, orders things and life really has no order.

Oh Doris Lessing, my dear -- your Anna is wrong about orgasms. They are no proof of love -- any more than that other Anna's fall under the wheels of that Russian train was a proof of love. It's all female shenanigans, cultural mishegoss, conditioning, brainwashing, male mythologizing. What does a woman want She wants what she has been told she ought to want. Anna Wulf wants orgasm, Anna Karenina, death. Orgasm is no proof of anything. Orgasm is proof of orgasm. Someday every woman will have orgasms -- like every family has color TV -- and we can all get on with the real business of life.