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My Generation Was Not Only Maligned In Book Reviews And Attacked In Graduate School But We Lived To See Our Adored And Adorable Daughters Wonder Why Feminism Had Become A Dirty Word.

-Erica Jong

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My Generation Was Not

Erica Jong

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My Generation Was Not Only Maligned In Book Reviews And Attacked In Graduate School But We Lived To See Our Adored And Adorable Daughters Wonder Why Feminism Had Become A Dirty Word.

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I've Become More Conservative About Sex As I've Gotten Older.

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.

What Was The Point Of Spending Your Life With Someone You Were Always Looking For Ways To Decieve?

No One To Blame! That Was Why Most People Led Lives They Hated, With People They Hated. How Wonderful To Have Someone To Blame! How Wonderful To Live With One's Nemesis! You May Be Miserable, But You Feel Forever In The Right. You May Be Fragmented, But You Feel Absolved Of All The Blame For It. Take Your Life In Your Own Hands, And What Happens? A Terrible Thing: No One To Blame.

In Freeing Myself From The Romantic Dream Of Finding Another Man To Come Along And Rescue Me, I Learned That No One Can Rescue Me Except Myself.

As A Reader, I Want A Book To Kidnap Me Into Its World. Its World Must Make My So-called Real World Seem Flimsy. Its World Must Lure Me To Return. When I Close The Book, I Should Feel Bereft.

Poems, Like Dreams, Are A Sort Of Royal Road To The Unconscious. They Tell You What Your Secret Self Cannot Express.

I Am Thinking Of The Onion Again. . . . Not Self-righteous Like The Proletarian Potato, Nor A Siren Like The Apple. No Show-off Like The Banana. But A Modest, Self-effacing Vegetable, Questioning, Introspective, Peeling Itself Away, Or Merely Radiating Halos Like Ripples.

Critics Write Out Of Intellectual Exercise, Not Poets. Poets Write Straight From The Heart.

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

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.

Famous People Complain About Fame, But They Never Want To Give It Back, Myself Included.

We Are Finally Driven To Monogamy Not By Morality But By Exhaustion.

I'm Not Classically Pretty; I've Always Been Too Heavy; I've Had Thyroid Disease And It's Very Hard For Me To Lose Weight - But I've Always Had Men Pursue Me. I've Always Had That 'it' Thing. God Knows Why. Maybe It's Pheromones, I Don't Know.

In A Way Women Are Fleshier Because Of Estrogen. It's Hard For Us To Lose Weight Because When We Get Super Skinny We Don't Ovulate. Women In Camps During The Holocaust Didn't Menstruate And Didn't Ovulate. They Were Starving; They Were Terrified. Why Emulate That Condition? It's Nonsensical To Me.

One Writes Not By Will But By Surrender.

When I Sit Down At My Writing Desk, Time Seems To Vanish. I Think It's A Wonderful Way To Spend One's Life.

Dogs Come Into Our Lives To Teach Us About Love And Loyalty. They Depart To Teach Us About Loss. A New Dog Never Replaces An Old Dog; It Merely Expands The Heart. If You Have Loved Many Dogs, Your Heart Is Very Big.

... What Is Great Poetry, After All, But The Continuation Of The Human Voice After Death?

I Look Forward And See Myself Look Back.

Is There Not An Arabick Proverb Which Goes, 'no One Throws Stones At A Barren Tree'?

Language Matters Because Whoever Controls The Words Controls The Conversation, Because Whoever Controls The Conversation Controls Its Outcome, Because Whoever Frames The Debate Has Already Won It, Because Telling The Truth Has Become Harder And Harder To Achieve In An America Drowning In Orwellian Newspeak.

I Think That The Joy Of Writing A Novel Is The Self-exploratio N That Emerges And Also That Wonderful Feeling Of Playing God With The Characters. When I Sit Down At My Writing Desk, Time Seems To Vanish. ... I Think The Most Important Thing For A Writer Is To Be Locked In A Study.

You Don't Get To Choose What You Get Famous For And You Don't Get To Control Which Of Your Life's Many Struggles Gets To Stand For You.

I Don't Cook. My Mother Didn't Cook. My Daughter Doesn't Cook.

Every Time Women Make Tremendous Strides, The Right Wing Gets Terrified And Creates Laws Making It Hard To Get An Abortion Or Birth Control.

I Remember Everything But Forgive Anyway.

Remembers Everything

Allow Me To Put The Record Straight. I Am Forty-six And Have Been For Some Years Past.

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.

Feminism Is Really The Right Of Women To Be Full Human Beings And To Not Be Defined Only By Their Childbearing Function. Feminism Is Really The Right Of Women To Be Human Beings. That's It, Yet That's So Frightening To A Lot Of People. A Full Human Being Wants Satisfying Work And Love. A Full Human Being Is Entitled To Both, And Is Not Simply Defined By Only One Aspect Of Her Being.

Never Follow A Dog Act. You Know You're On The Skids When You Play Yourself In The Movie Version Of Your Life.

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

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

A Book Burrows Into Your Life In A Very Profound Way Because The Experience Of Reading Is Not Passive.

We Were Not Human Beings Going Through Spiritual Experiences; We Were Spiritual Beings Going Through Human Experiences, In Order To Grow.

Human Experience

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.

Loving Someone Is A Loss Of Freedom - But One Doesn't Think Of It As Loss Because One Gains So Much Else.

At Times It Is Strangely Sedative To Know The Extent Of Your Own Powerlessness.

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

When Everyone Thinks They Know You, It's Hard Not To Be Guarded.

Being A Daughter Is Only Half The Equation; Bearing One Is The Other.

Courage Is The Only Magic Worth Having.

The Older We Get, The More Jewish We Become In My Family.

What Makes A Man Love Death, Fanny? Is It Because He Hopes To Avert His Own By Watchin' The Deaths Of Others? Doth He Hope To Devour Death By Devourin' Executions With His Eyes? I'll Ne'er Understand It, If I Live To Be Eight Hundred Years. The Human Beast Is More Beast Than Human, 'tis True.

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.

The Truth Is Simple, You Do Not Die From Love. You Only Wish You Did.

All Natural Disasters Are Comforting Because They Reaffirm Our Impotence, In Which, Otherwise, We Might Stop Believing. At Times It Is Strangely Sedative To Know The Extent Of Your Own Powerlessness.

O What Is It About Having One's Own Babe Upon One's Hip That Makes A Woman Wish To Go Home To Her Mother? A Desire To Say: 'look, The Circle Is Compleat'? A Desire To Say: 'look, I Have Cross'd The Divide And Now Am More Like You'? A Desire To Say: 'look, This Babe I Offer You Is My Most Precious Gift'?

Women Are Individuals In Parenting, And Why Not?

It Is For This, Partly, That I Write. How Can I Know What I Think Unless I See What I Write.

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.

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.

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.

Once I Worshipped Keats For Dying Young. Now I Think It's Braver To Die Old.

We've Shown Again And Again, In Every Un Report On The Status Of Women, That Wherever Women Control Their Own Bodies And Have Access To Education, Societies Prosper. Men's Fortunes Go Up, Children's Fortunes Go Up. This Is Not News - It's Been Proven Repeatedly. Anywhere Those Things Are Threatened, We Have To Defend Them.

If You Imagine The World Listening, You'll Never Write A Line. That's Why Privacy Is So Important. You Should Write First Drafts As If They Will Never Be Shown To Anyone.

I Tried To Keep Myself Away From Him By Using Con Words Like "fidelity" And "adultery", By Telling Myself That He Would Interfere With My Work, That I Had Him I'd Be Too Happy To Write. I Tried To Tell Myself I Was Hurting Bennett, Hurting Myself, Making A Spectacle Of Myself. I Was. But Nothing Helped. I Was Possessed. The Minute He Walked Into A Room And Smiled At Me, I Was A Goner.

The Only People Worth Writing About Are Those About Whom The Last Word Cannot Be Said.

The Future Is Merely A Shadow Which Blocks Out The Joys Of The Present And Emphasizes The Miseries Of The Past.

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.

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?

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

Isn't That The Problem? That Women Have Been Swindled For Centuries Into Substituting Adornment For Love, Fashion (as It Were) For Passion?

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.

If There's Anything The World Disdains More Than Uppity Young Women, It's Uppity Old Women. Dying Young Has Always Been A Woman's Best Career Move.

Beware The Lure Of A Handsome Face, The All Too Ready Assumption That The Lovely Façade Must Needs Have Lovely Chambers Within; For As 'tis With Great Houses, So, Too, With Great Men.

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.

There Were 117 Psychoanalysts On The Pan Am Flight To Vienna And I'd Been Treated By At Least Six Of Them. And Married A Seventh.

Love Is Everything It's Cracked Up To Be

Sex Is God's Joke On The Human Race ... If We Didn't Have Sex To Make Us Ridiculous, She Would Have Had To Think Up Something Else Instead.

Coupling Doesn't Always Have To Do With Sex ... Two People Holding Each Other Up Like Flying Buttresses. Two People Depending On Each Other And Babying Each Other And Defending Each Other Against The World Outside. Sometimes It Was Worth All The Disadvantages Of Marriage Just To Have That: One Friend In An Indifferent World.

I Prefer To Work In The Morning. I Get Up Now At Five In The Morning. In The Morning Is When I Feel Freshest.

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.

If, Every Day, I Dare To Remember That I Am Here On Loan, That This House, This Hillside, These Minutes Are All Leased To Me, Not Given, I Will Never Despair.

Murky Language Means Someone Wants To Pick Your Pocket.

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

What A Damnably Lonely Profession Writing Is! In Order To Do It, One Must Banish The World, And Having Banished It, One Feels Cosmically Alone.

Creativity Demands Nothing Less Than All You Have. Talent Alone Is Never Enough.

People In The Land Of Lala Look Like Expensive Wax Fruit. And They Work Hard To Achieve That Look.

How Wonderful To Have Someone To Blame! How Wonderful To Live With One's Nemesis! You May Be Miserable, But You Feel Forever In The Right.

This Is The Sad Bed Of Chosen Chastity Because You Are Miles And Mountains Away.

Long Distance Relationship

Because I Loved Myself, I Was Loved.

Women Are Not The Richer Sex. Women Are Not Equal In Society.

Art Is Not Advocacy And Advocacy Is Not Art.

The Trick Is Not How Much Pain You Feel - But How Much Joy You Feel

I Think Poetry Is The Best Thing I Do. It's Certainly The Purest. I Seem To Switch Gears Without Too Much Trouble. Non-fiction Is In Many Ways The Easiest To Write.

Anger Is Really Disappointed Hope.

Every Country Gets The Circus It Deserves. Spain Gets Bullfights. Italy The Church. America Hollywood.

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.

If We Are All Made Of God, It Is Our Friends Who Remind Us. We Pass The Gift Of God To Them. They Pass It Back To Us When We Need It Most.

It's Easier To Write About Pain Than About Joy. Joy Is Wordless.

The Camera Creates A Magical Transformation. It's Not Enough To Exist; We Must Chronicle That Existence. ... Narrative- And Image-making Creatures Like Humans Don't Feel Any Experience Is Complete Unless It's Recorded.

If We Can Be Sufficient Unto Ourselves, We Need Fear No Entangling Webs.

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.

Love Is Serene And Calm

Tis True That Tho' People Can Transcend Their Characters In Times Of Tranquillity, They Can Ne'er Do So In Times Of Tumult.

I Have Enormous Pride In The Survival Of The Jewish People, The Cultural Heritage Of The Jewish People, But I'm Not Observant, And I Don't Belong To A Synagogue. I Don't Go To Temple On High Holy Days, But I'm Proud To Be Jewish.

People Always Think That History Proceeds In A Straight Line. It Doesn't. Social Attitudes Don't Change In A Straight Line. There's Always A Backlash Against Progressive Ideas.

We All Parent The Best We Can. Being Human, We're Ambivalent. We Want Perfection For Our Babies, But We Also Need Sleep.

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

Compose With Utter Freedom And Edit With Utter Discipline.

A Dreary Censorship, And Self-censorship, Has Been Imposed On Books By The Centralization Of The Book Industry.

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.

Women Who Bear Children Before They Establish Serious Habits Of Work, May Never Establish Them At All.

Writing About Sex Turns Out To Be Just Writing About Life.

I Have Ne'er Been In A Chamber With A Lawyer When I Did Not Wish Either To Scream With Desperation Or Else Fall Into The Deepest Of Sleeps, E'en When The Matter Concern'd My Own Future Most Profoundly.

I Am Not Sure If Love Is A Salve Or Just A Deeper Kind Of Wound.

Souls Have Neither Sex Nor Colour.

The Unconscious Of An Artist Is Her Greatest Treasure. It Is What Transmutes The Dross Of Autobiography Into The Gold Of Myth.

Greatest Treasure

The Hardest Part Is Believing In Yourself At The Notebook Stage. It Is Like Believing In Dreams In The Morning.

To Name Oneself Is The First Act Of Both The Poet And The Revolutionary. When We Take Away The Right To An Individual Name, We Symbolically Take Away The Right To Be An Individual. Immigration Officials Did This To Refugees; Husbands Routinely Do It To Wives.

I Write Lustily And Humorously. It Isn't Calculated; It's The Way I Think. I've Invented A Writing Style That Expresses Who I Am.

I Think Men Have Always Been Afraid Of Women's Sexuality, And The Restrictions They Put On Women Testify To That.

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

Each Day That I Don't Write I Get More Fragmented.

Anybody Who Instantly Goes From Being A Poet And A Graduate Student To Being A Public Figure Has To Be In A State Of Shock. First People Want To Praise You, And Then They Want To Attack You. No One Can Prepare You For It.

There Is This Tendency To Think That If You Could Only Find The Magic Way, Then You Could Become A Poet. "tell Me How To Become A Poet. Tell Me What To Do." . . . What Makes You A Poet Is A Gift For Language, An Ability To See Into The Heart Of Things, And An Ability To Deal With Important Unconscious Material. When All These Things Come Together, You're A Poet. But There Isn't One Little Gimmick That Makes You A Poet. There Isn't Any Formula For It.

My Grandchildren Are Fabulous And Funny.

[henry Miller] Was Such A Scribomaniac That Even When He Lived In The Same House As Lawrence Durrell They Often Exchanged Letters. For Most Of His Life, Henry Wrote Literally Dozens Of Letters A Day To People He Could Have Easily Engaged In Conversation - And Did. The Writing Process, In Short, Was Essential. As It Is To All Real Writers, Writing Was Life And Breath To Him. He Put Out Words As A Tree Puts Out Leaves.

Women Really Must Have Equal Pay For Equal Work, Equality In Work At Home, And Reproductive Choices. Men Must Press For These Things Also. They Must Cease To See Them As "women's Issues" And Learn That They Are Everyone's Issues - Essential To Survival On Planet Earth.

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.

I Don't Think That I Had Any Idea That 'fear Of Flying' Would Become A Part Of The Culture. I Had No Idea That It Would Go All Over The World And Be Published In Chinese And Serbo-croat And So On.

I Think Feminism Means What It Has Always Meant - Women Want To Use All Their Gifts, All Their Talents And Be Judged Impartially For Them. I Don't Think Feminism Has Ever Meant Anything Else.

What I Discovered Was Is That It's Rare To Find A Person That You Feel Very Intimate With, And You Can Sleep With Lots Of People And Not Find What You're Looking For.

But Come Back In November Or December, In February Or March, When The Fog, La Nebbia, Settles Upon The City Like A Marvelous Monster, And You Will Have Little Trouble Believing That Things Can Appear And Disappear In This Labyrinthine City, Or That Time Here Could Easily Slip In Its Sprockets And Take You, Willingly Or Unwillingly, Back.

Is There A Phrase In The English Language More Fraught With Menace Than A Tax Audit?

Singularity Shows Something Wrong In The Mind.

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

Impossible Situations

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

Why Does Life Need Evidence Of Life?

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.

If We Don't Risk Anything, We Risk Even More.

Pregnancy Seemed Like A Tremendous Abdication Of Control. Something Growing Inside You Which Would Eventually Usurp Your Life.

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.

Conflict Is The Soul Of Literature.

I Hope We Don't Have To Keep Going Back Over The Same Territory And Winning The Same Rights Over And Over Again. The Battle For Birth Control. The Battle For Abortion. The Parity Of Women's Health. It's Very Depressing To Think That You Win These Rights, But Then You Have To Win Them Again, And Again, And Again, And Fight The Same Battles Over And Over.

Generations Of Women Have Sacrificed Their Lives To Become Their Mothers. But We Do Not Have That Luxury Any More. The World Has Changed Too Much To Let Us Have The Lives Our Mothers Had. And We Can No Longer Afford The Guilt We Feel At Not Being Our Mothers. We Cannot Afford Any Guilt That Pulls Us Back To The Past. We Have To Grow Up, Whether We Want To Or Not. We Have To Stop Blaming Men And Mothers And Seize Every Second Of Our Lives With Passion. We Can No Longer Afford To Waste Our Creativity. We Cannot Afford Spiritual Laziness.

I'm Interested In What Happens To People When They Get Into That Publicity Machine. We Tend To Think Things Have Changed, But There's Still A Deep Sexism Underlying The Way Women Are Treated Publicly.

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

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.

I Believe I Belong To The Last Literary Generation, The Last Generation, That Is, For Whom Books Are A Religion.

There Is Nothing Fiercer Than A Failed Artist. The Energy Remains, But, Having No Outlet, It Implodes In A Great Black Fart Of Rage Which Smokes Up All The Inner Windows Of The Soul. Horrible As Successful Artists Often Are, There Is Nothing Crueler Or More Vain Than A Failed Artist.

I Believe That Women Should Live For Love, For Motherhood And For Intellect, And I Believe We Shouldn't Have To Choose. And I Believe That's Always Been Difficult For Women, To Express Themselves Intellectually, Maternally, And Passionately.

Love Is Love, But Marriage Is An Investment.

Ken, My Husband, Just Smelled Like He Belonged To Me. I'm Not Talking About Hygiene. I'm Talking About When You Hug Him, He Either Feels Like A Member Of Your Tribe Or Not. It's Their Scent.

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.

What Are The Sources Of Poetry? Love And Death And The Paradox Of Love And Death. All Poetry From The Beginning Is About Eros And Thanatos. Those Are The Only Subjects. And How Eros And Thanatos Interweave.

A Concern With 'public Morality' Is - If Not The Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel - The First Foray Of The Fascist.

Men And Women, Women And Men. It Will Never Work.

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.

Love Is Everything It's Cracked Up To Be. It Really Is Worth Fighting For, Being Brave For, Risking Everything For.

Pleasure Is Terrifying Because It Breaks Down The Boundaries Between People. Embracing Passion Means Living With Fear.

In Any Triangle, Who Is The Betrayer, Who The Unseen Rival, And Who The Humiliated Lover? Oneself, Oneself, And No One But Oneself!

It Takes Courage To Lead A Life. Any Life.

Writing Is One Of The Few Professions Left Where You Take All The Responsibility For What You Do. It's Really Dangerous And Ultimately Destroys You As A Writer If You Start Thinking About Responses To Your Work Or What Your Audience Needs.

That Was Probably The Mistake Of My Generation, That We Thought That Having Sex With Anyone Would Be Intimate And It Wasn't.

Each Of Us Only Feels The Torn Lining Of His Own Coat And Sees The Wholeness Of The Other Person's.

Everyone's A Little Crazy When You Get Inside Their Head... It's Only A Matter Of Degree.

We Write Poems / As Leaves Give Oxygen - / So We Can Breathe.

There Are No Atheists On Turbulent Airplanes.

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.

Having Stopped Expecting Truth, We Rarely Get It.

Why Do Analysts Always Answer A Question With A Question?

We Write As If Our Lives Depended Upon It. They Do.

A New Dog Never Replaces An Old Dog, It Merely Expands The Heart.

Blocks Usually Stem From Fear Of Being Judged. If You Imagine The World Is Listening, You'll Never Write A Line.

My Generation Was Not Only Maligned In Book Reviews And Attacked In Graduate School But We Lived To See Our Adored And Adorable Daughters Wonder Why Feminism Had Become A Dirty Word.

Feminism Is Teaching. I've Gotten A Lot Of Pleasure Pushing Younger Writers That I've Met And Worked With.

I See The Whole Episode In My Memory As If It Were A Very Crisply Photographed Black And White Movie. Directed By Bergman Perhaps.we Are Playing Ourselves In The Movie Version. If Only We Could Escape From Always Having To Play Ourselves !

Black And White

Poetry Is What We Turn To In The Most Emotional Moments Of Our Life - When A Beloved Friend Dies, When A Baby Is Born Or When We Fall In Love.

Falling In Love

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.

Since Flesh Can't Stay, We Pass The Words Along.

Hate Generalizes; Love Is Particular.

What Was Time But A Convention, A Habit Of Mind, A Custom Of Dress?

A Soul Is Partly Given, Partly Wrought; Remember Always That You Are The Maker Of Your Own Soul.

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.

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

The Worst Thing About Jealousy Is How Low It Makes You Reach.

The Only Difference Between Men And Women Is That Women Are Able To Create New Little Human Beings In Their Bodies While Simultaneously Writing Books, Driving Tractors, Working In Offices, Planting Crops - In General, Doing Everything Men Do.

Young People Never Believe In The Possibility Of Their Own Deaths. That's One Reason Old Men Can Send Them To War.

I Didn't Believe In Systems. Everything Human Was Imperfect And Ultimately Absurd. What Did I Believe In Then? In Humor. In Laughing At Systems, At People, At One's Self. In Laughing Even At One's Need To Laugh All The Time. In Seeing Life As Contradictory, Many-sided, Various, Funny, Tragic, And With Moments Of Outrageous Beauty. In Seeing Life As A Fruitcake, Including Delicious Plums And Bad Peanuts, But Meant To Be Devoured Hungrily All The Same Because You Couldn't Feast On The Plums Without Also Sometimes Being Poisoned By The Peanuts.

Women Tend To Be Preservers Of The Social Structure, Of Marriage. They Don't Want To Upset Their Husbands Or Their Significant Others. They Don't Want To Hurt People.

Surviving Means Being Born Over And Over.

A Baby's A Full Time Job For Three Adults. Nobody Tells You That When You're Pregnant, Or You'd Probably Jump Off A Bridge. Nobody Tells You How All-consuming It Is To Be A Mother-how Reading Goes Out The Window And Thinking Too.

People Are Terrified. A Lot Of Them Are In Relationships That Aren't Satisfying, And If You Tell Them They Can Change Their Life, They Get Really Scared.

If You've Been A Pretty Woman And Always Pursued By Lovers, Losing That And Not Having That - It Feels Like A Great Loss.

Men Must Be Stripped Of Arrogance And Women Must Become Independent For Any Mutually Nurturing Alliance To Endure Between The Sexes.

I Don't Think That Sex Necessarily Produces Intimacy.

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

I Am Against Censorship. I Prefer The Chaos Of Uncontrollable Communication Of All Sorts To Selective Banning Of Certain Materials. I Do Not Think Human Beings Can Be Trusted To Be Above Politics And To Promote The Common Good. One Group's Common Good Is Another Group's Evil.

Always Do The Things You Fear The Most. Courage Is An Acquired Taste, Like Caviar.

The Sexuality Doesn't End. It Really Doesn't. You're Sexual Your Whole Life, If You're A Sexual Person.

Don't Ye Know That Ev'ry Soul On Earth Feels Itself To Be An Orphan?

It Is The Nature Of Those Books We Call Classics To Wait Patiently On The Shelf For Us To Grow Into Them.

I Do Believe That In Every Age There Are People Whose Consciousness Transcends Their Own Time And That These People, Whether Fictional Or Historical, Are Those With Whom We Most Closely Identify And Those About Whom We Most Enjoy Reading.

Plot Is Just A Fancy Way Of Saying 'and Then.

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

A Baby's Mother Also Needs A Mother.

Every Time We Hit An Air Pocket And The Plane Dropped About Five Hundred Feet (leaving My Stomach In My Mouth) I Vowed To Give Up Sex, Bacon, And Air Travel If I Ever Made It Back To Terra Firma In One Piece.

Most Sex Doesn't Really Bring People Together. You Have To Reach A Certain Level Of Connection, I Think, And That's Pretty Rare.

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