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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

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Certain Very Old People

Erica Jong

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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.

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I Think The Jews Are An Amazing Group Of People And Their Survival Is Amazing.

You Should Write First Drafts As If They Will Never Be Shown To Anyone.

All People Believe Their Suffering Is Greater Than Others.

What I Would Like To Give My Daughter Is Freedom. And This Is Something That Must Be Given By Example, Not Exhortation. Freedom Is A Loose Leash, License To Be Different From Your Mother And Still Be Loved...freedom Is...not Insisting That Your Daughter Share Your Limitations. Freedom Also Means Letting Your Daughter Reject You When She Needs To And Come Back When She Needs To. Freedom Is Unconditional Love.

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I Mostly Hate Organized Religion, Which I Think Is A Force For The Oppression Of Women And Creates Warfare.

Perfectionism Is The Enemy Of Art. Since Art Is Essentially Divine Play, Not Dogged Work, It Often Happens That As One Becomes More Professionally Driven One Also Becomes Less Capriciously Playful.

Love Is Everything It's Cracked Up To Be

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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.

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Denounce Useless Guilt. Don’t Make A Cult Of Suffering. Live In The Now(or At Least The Soon). Always Do The Things You Fear Most. Courage Is An Acquired Taste Like Caviar. Trust All Joy. If The Evil Eye Fixes You In Its Gaze, Look Elsewhere. Get Ready To Be 87.

Despite All The Cynical Things Writers Have Said About Writing For Money, The Truth Is We Write For Love. That Is Why It Is So Easy To Exploit Us.

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A Man Assumes That A Woman's Refusal Is Just Part Of A Game. Or, At Any Rate, A Lot Of Men Assume That. When A Man Says No, It's No. When A Woman Says No, It's Yes, Or At Least Maybe. There Is Even A Joke To That Effect. And Little By Little, Women Begin To Believe In This View Of Themselves.

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Blaming Women Is Always In Fashion.

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Humor Is One Of The Most Serious Tools We Have For Dealing With Impossible Situations.

Impossible Situations

I Think We’re [men And Women] More Similar. In That We All Deal With Our Fantasy Lives And Sometimes Are Disappointed By Reality.

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Fear Is A Sign-usually A Sign That I'm Doing Something Right.

Harriet Van Horne He Makes Love To Me Expertly, Mechanically, Coldly... He's Pressing All My Buttons, As If I Were A Pocket Calculator.

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Most Sex Is Not Really Intimate.

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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.

My Advice To You Is Get Married: If You Find A Good Wife You'll Be Happy; If Not, You'll Become A Philosopher." - Socrates (470-399 B.c.) "advice Is What We Ask For When We Already Know The Answer But Wish We Didn't

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I Have Accepted Fear As A Part Of Life - Specifically The Fear Of Change... I Have Gone Ahead Despite The Pounding In The Heart That Says: Turn Back.

It Is Not Unusual To Hate Great Writers Before We Learn To Love Them. Because They Have Created Something That Did Not Yet Exist, They Must Also Create Their Audience. Sometimes The Audience Is Not Yet Ready. Sometimes It Has Yet To Be Born.

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The Body Is Wiser Than Its Inhabitants. The Body Is The Soul. The Body Is God’s Messenger.

Genius Is A Strong Aphrodisiac.

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Perhaps It Is Because Venice Is Both Liquid And Solid, Both Air And Stone, That It Somehow Combines All The Elements Crucial To Make Our Imaginations Ignite And Turn Fantasies Into Realities.

Love Is Serene And Calm

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Is A Currency Worth Anything If No One Wants It? We Used To Buy Shoes In Italy. Remember?

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Images Are ... A Kind Of Emotional Shorthand.

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.

Each Artist Or Writer Who Works In Venice Comes To Believe That The City Yields Its Most Special Secret To Him Or Her Alone.

Jealousy Is All The Fun You Think They Had.

What I Would Like To Give My Daughter Is Freedom. And This Is Something That Must Be Given By Example, Not By Exhortation.

Biography Is Essentially A Collaborative Art, The Latest Biographer Collaborating With All Those Who Wrote Earlier.

Poetry Is The Inner Life Of A Culture, Its Nervous System, Its Deepest Way Of Imagining The World. A Culture That Ignores Its Poets, Chokes Off Its Nervous System And Becomes Mortally Ill.

At Certain Historic Moments, Grandparents Took On Childrearing Responsibilities. In Many Cultures, They Still Do. Chinese Grandparents Who Are Able To Retire At 55 Are Seen All Over Beijing Bouncing Grandbabies. In The United States, We Can't Afford To Retire At 55.

When I'm Sitting At The Desk Not Being Able To Write Line One, It's Silence And Despair! It's Not So Easy To Put The Pen To The Legal Pad Or Type The First Sentence On The Computer Screen.

Pain Is Not Love. Love Flowers; Love Gives Without Taking; Love Is Serene And Calm.

Memory Is The Crux Of Our Humanity. Without Memory We Have No Identities. That Is Really Why I Am Committing An Autobiography.

Writers Do Not Choose Their Subjects; Their Subjects Choose Them.

Whenever I Go Anywhere But Italy For A Vacation, I Always Feel Vaguely Disappointed, As If I Have Made A Mistake.

As Women, We Can't Look Old. We Can't Be Fat. We're Supposed To Look Like The 14-year-old Models In Vogue, Who Are Younger And Younger And Skinnier And Skinnier, And They Are Air-brushed And Contoured And Photoshopped.

Writers Are Always At The Edge Of The Inferno, And The Fire Is Licking At Our Toes. Luckily, This Turns Us On!

As Women Got Little Crumbs Of Power, Men Began To Act Paranoid - As If We'd Disabled Them Utterly. Do All Women Have To Keep Silent For Men To Speak? Do All Women Have To Be Legless For Men To Walk?

Women's Books Are Kind Of Discriminated Against. If A Man Writes A Book About His Family Stories, People Think Of It As Literature. If It's A Woman, She's 'spilling Her Guts,' And It's Not Art.

I Was Surprised By My Daughter's Generation And How They Were Rebelling Against The '70s Idea That Sex Was Perfect And It Should Be Sought.

Writing Has Often Been Accompanied By Terror, Silences, And Then Wild Bursts Of Private Laughter That Suddenly Make All The Dread Seem Worthwhile.

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?

The Perfect Man Is The True Partner. Not A Bed Partner Nor A Fun Partner, But A Man Who Will Shoulder Burdens Equally With You And Possess That Quality Of Joy.

You Must Have A Certain Amount Of Maturity To Be A Poet. Seldom Do Sixteen-year-olds Know Themselves Well Enough.

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.

I Look Forward And See Myself Look Back.

A Wet Dream In The Mind Of New York.

Fame Is Merely The Fact Of Being Misunderstood By Millions Of People.

We've Lost More Men To Homosexuality Than We Ever Did In Two World Wars.

Spring, / You Are A Pinking Shears: You Cut / Fresh Edges On The World.

Silence Is The Bluntest Of Blunt Instruments. It Seems To Hammer You Into The Ground. It Drives You Deeper And Deeper Into Your Own Guilt. It Makes The Voices Inside Your Head Accuse You More Viciously Than Any Outside Voices Ever Could.

But We Should Ask The Question: Why Should A Writer Be More Than A Writer? Why Should A Writer Be A Guru? Why Are We Supposed To Be Psychiatrists? Isn't It Enough To Write And Tell The Truth? It's Not Like Telling The Truth Is Common. Writers Are The Earthworms Of Society. We Aerate The Soil. That's Enough.

Sex Has The Unparalleled Power To Make Us Absurd To Ourselves. It Also Has The Power To Make Us Understand Transcendence.

Friends Love Misery, In Fact. Sometimes, Especially If We Are Too Lucky Or Too Successful Or Too Pretty, Our Misery Is The Only Thing That Endears Us To Our Friends.

My Grandchildren Are Fabulous And Funny.

They Keep Saying The Right Person Will Come Along. I Think Mine Got Hit By A Truck.

The Most Important Education You Get Is Your Own - The One You Learn In Solitude.

Eating Is Never So Simple As Hunger.

Women In America Read 'lifestyle' Pages Which Are Really Glorifications Of Shopping. They Teach Us We Must Veil Ourselves In Make-up To Be Loved. And We Willingly Take The Veil, Thinking Ourselves Freed By It. Make-up Is No More Optional For Us Than The Veil Is For Arab Women: It Is Our Western Version Of The Chador.

I Am Not Quite Sure How Writing Changes Things, But I Know That It Does. It Is Indirect-like The Trails Of Earthworms Aerating The Earth. It Is Not Always Deliberate-like The Tails Of Glowing Dust Dragged By Comets.

Poetry Is Fired By Love.

My Generation Of Young Female Writers Discovered That We Could Dictate The Form And Content Of Our Own Fiction.

We Need Quiet Time To Examine Our Lives Openly And Honestly...spending Quiet Time Alone Gives Your Mind An Opportunity To Renew Itself And Create Order.- Susan Taylor--everyone Has A Talent. What Is Rare Is The Courage To Nurture It In Solitude And To Follow The Talent To The Dark Places Where It Leads.

It's Important To Know What You're Going To Spend Your Life On, And The Only Way You're Going To Find That Is By Connecting With The Force Inside Yourself.

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