Erica Jong: Trending quotes

“I don't 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”

“Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage -- however often we are hurt as a result of it.”

“Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.”

“Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye…”

“Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.”

“Without sex it would be so easy to choose appropriate people to live with. Sex was the joker in an otherwise rational deck.”

“The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.”

“Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.”

“I have accepted fear as part of life – specifically the fear of change… I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back….”

“It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.”

“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't…”

“Anger is really disappointed hope.”

“Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.”

“Beware of the man who denounces woman writers; his penis is tiny and he cannot spell.”

“Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.”

“I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.”

“We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.”

“The trick is not how much pain you feel--but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.”

“I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.”