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Throughout Much Of History, Women Writers Have Capitulated To Male Standards, And Have Paid Too Much Heed To What Virginia Woolf Calls "the Angel In The House." She Is That Little Ghost Who Sits On One's Shoulder While One Writes And Whispers, "be Nice, Don't Say Anything That Will Embarrass The Family, Don't Say Anything Your Man Will Disapprove Of ..." [ellipsis In Original] The "angel In The House" Castrates One's Creativity Because It Deprives One Of Essential Honesty, And Many Women Writers Have Yet To Win The Freedom To Be Honest With Themselves.

-Erica Jong

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Throughout Much Of History,

Erica Jong

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Throughout Much Of History, Women Writers Have Capitulated To Male Standards, And Have Paid Too Much Heed To What Virginia Woolf Calls "the Angel In The House." She Is That Little Ghost Who Sits On One's Shoulder While One Writes And Whispers, "be Nice, Don't Say Anything That Will Embarrass The Family, Don't Say Anything Your Man Will Disapprove Of ..." [ellipsis In Original] The "angel In The House" Castrates One's Creativity Because It Deprives One Of Essential Honesty, And Many Women Writers Have Yet To Win The Freedom To Be Honest With Themselves.

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In Loving Life You Love What Can't Survive.

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It Is Not Surprising That Venice Is Known Above All For Mirrors And Glass Since Venice Is The Most Narcissistic City In The World, The City That Celebrates Self-mirroring.

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

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

Silence Is The Bluntest Of Blunt Instruments.

Each One An Antidote To The One That Went Before. Each One A Reaction, An About-face, A Rebound.

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

Sometimes It Was Worth All The Disadvantages Of Marriage Just To Have That: One Friend In An Indifferent World.

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 Am Never So Calm As After I Have Written. And The Next Morning I Will Feel The Familiar Anxiety And I Will Have To Begin The Process All Over Again.

Throughout Much Of History, Women Writers Have Capitulated To Male Standards, And Have Paid Too Much Heed To What Virginia Woolf Calls "the Angel In The House." She Is That Little Ghost Who Sits On One's Shoulder While One Writes And Whispers, "be Nice, Don't Say Anything That Will Embarrass The Family, Don't Say Anything Your Man Will Disapprove Of ..." [ellipsis In Original] The "angel In The House" Castrates One's Creativity Because It Deprives One Of Essential Honesty, And Many Women Writers Have Yet To Win The Freedom To Be Honest With Themselves.

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.

Fame Means Millions Of People Have The Wrong Idea Of Who You Are.

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

Greatest Treasure

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

I Think A Lot Of People, When They Read About A Woman Who Acknowledges Her Sexuality And Her Feelings, Get Really Scared. They Say They Want To Be Fearless, But In Reality They're Terrified. If They Acknowledge Their Deepest Feelings, They Might Have To Change Their Lives.

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.

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

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

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

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

Few Women See Power As An End In Itself. The Point Of Power Is The Freedom To Cultivate Roses.

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.

Sex Just As A Drive, As A Hormonal Drive, Is Not Very Interesting.

Very Interesting

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

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

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.

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

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.

Because I Loved Myself, I Was Loved.

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

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.

No One Ever Found Wisdom Without Also Being A Fool.

I Have Forgotten My Rave Reviews And Memorized My Vicious Ones - Like Most Writers.

Someday Every Woman Will Have Orgasms- Like Every Family Has Color Tv- And We Can All Get On With The Business Of Life.

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.

It Is The City Of Mirrors, The City Of Mirages, At Once Solid And Liquid, At Once Air And Stone.

I Believe That There's A Force Of Life In The Universe, And That When We're Writing Or Making Music Or Painting, We're Likely To Connect With That Flow.

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

Women Are The Only Exploited Group In History To Have Been Idealized Into Powerlessness.

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.

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.

I Think Professionalism Is Important, And Professionalism Means You Get Paid.

Of All The Foolish Fears Of Humankind, Fear Of The Future Is By Far The Most Foolish.

Love Is Serene And Calm

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Courage Is The Only Magic Worth Having.

Court, In Our Society, Is Often The Last Resort Of Stubbornness.

Eating Is Never So Simple As Hunger.

Birth Is The Start Of Loneliness And Loneliness The Start Of Poetry.

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

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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.

All People Believe Their Suffering Is Greater Than Others.

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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.

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

Women Are Individuals In Parenting, And Why Not?

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.

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Singularity Shows Something Wrong In The Mind.

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.

The Lives Of Great Men Are More Oft' At Variance With Their Profess'd Phillosophies Than Consistent With 'em.

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

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

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

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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.

Genius Is A Strong Aphrodisiac.

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

The Passion That One Soul Hath For God Cannot Be Judged By Another.

Sex And Creativity Are Often Seen By Dictators As Subversive Activities.

I Remember Everything But Forgive Anyway.

Remembers Everything

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Perhaps All Artists Were, In A Sense, Housewives: Tenders Of The Earth Household.

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Language Can't Be Appropriated By One Person, One Poet. The Words Belong To All Of Us.

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

We All Have Fantasies About Sex That Are More Perfect Than Anything In Reality.

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.

The Desire For Magic Cannot Be Eradicated. Even The Most Supposedly Rational People Attempt To Practice Magic In Love And War. We Simultaneously Possess The Most Primitive Of Brain Stems And The Most Sophisticated Of Cortices. The Imperatives Of Each Coexist Uneasily.

We Need Poetry Most At Those Moments When Life Astounds Us With Losses, Gains, Or Celebrations. We Need It Most When We Are Most Hurt, Most Happy, Most Downcast, Most Jubilant. Poetry Is The Language We Speak In Times Of Greatest Need. And The Fact That It Is An Endangered Species In Our Culture Tells Us That We Are In Deep Trouble.

It Took Me Years To Learn To Sit At My Desk For More Than Two Minutes At A Time, To Put Up With The Solitude And The Terror Of Failure, And The Godawful Silence And The White Paper.

Though My Friends Envied Me Because I Always Seemed So Cheerful And Confident, I Was Secretly Terrified Of Practically Everything.

Great Loves Have Legs And Wings. They Are Substantial. They Do Not Dissapate So Easily... Great Loves Have Staying Power. Or So I Told Myself.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

You Must Find The Right Voice (or Voices) For The Timbre That Can Convince A Reader To Give Himself Up To You.

And The Trouble Is, If You Don't Risk Anything, You Risk Even More.

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.

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

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

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

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.

You're Not Too Fat; You're Just In The Wrong Country.

I Have A Very Sensitive Nose. I Identify With Dogs. I Understand The World Through My Nose.

The Problem With Feminism In The Second Wave Was That We Fought So Much Among Ourselves, And I Think We Did So Much Damage To The Movement... And I Think The Next Wave, The Third Wave, Is Women Mentoring Younger Women And Women Helping Younger Women To Enter The Political Process And The Writing World.

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

Women Are Their Own Worst Enemies. And Guilt Is The Main Weapon Of Self-torture . . . Show Me A Woman Who Doesn't Feel Guilty And I'll Show You A Man.

It Is A Sad Paradox That When Male Authors Impersonate Women ... They Are Said To Be Dealing With 'cosmic, Major Concerns' - But When We Impersonate Ourselves We Are Said To Be Writing 'women's Fiction' Or 'women's Poetry.

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.

How Could One Create Life With Someone Who Represented Death?

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

I've Kept Journals At Many Times In My Life Starting From When I Was About 13 Or 14. But It's Boring And Contrived To Keep A Journal Every Day. Better To Write As The Mood Strikes.

I Don't Necessarily Read Everything. I Read What I Need To Read To Inspire The Book I'm Trying To Finish.

Keeping A Journal Implies Hope.

Keeping A Journal

I Understand That Unless You Have A Government Of Laws, Rather Than A Government Of People, You Cannot Protect Dissent. And I Understand, As A Woman Who Probably Would Have Been Burned In The Marketplace For Witchcraft Only About 200 Years Ago, That I Need The First Amendment More Than Anybody Does. And That Even If I Am Repelled By Child Pornography Or Bob Guccione's Productions, That I Have To Protect Those Things, Because Essentially It's In My Self-interest To Do So.

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.

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

[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.

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

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.

If We Ban Whatever Offends Any Group In Our Diverse Society, We Will Soon Have No Art, No Culture, No Humor, No Satire. Satire Is By Its Nature Offensive. So Is Much Art And Political Discourse. The Value Of These Expressions Far Outweighs Their Risk.

Diverse Society

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

Souls Have Neither Sex Nor Colour.

Not Everybody Has To Be A Parent. In Fact, In An Overpopulated World Where Our Resources Are Shrinking, It Would Be Wonderful If People Who Didn't Want Children Felt Free To Say So. In The 1970s, There Was More Tolerance For The Idea That Not Everybody Needs To Be A Biological Parent.

When You Start Having Lunch And Actually Eating, It's Already Over.

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

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.

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.

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

The Most Important Thing For A Writer Is To Be Locked In A Study.

Motherhood Cannot Finally Be Delegated. Breast-feeding May Succumb To The Bottle; Cuddling, Fondling, And Paediatric Visits May Also Be Done By Fathers...but When A Child Needs A Mother To Talk To, Nobody Else But A Mother Will Do.

Beware Of Books. They Are More Than Innocent Assemblages Of Paper And Ink And String And Glue. If They Are Any Good, They Have The Spirit Of The Author Within. Authors Are Rogues And Ruffians And Easy Lays. They Are Gluttons For Sweets And Savories. They Devour Life And Always Want More. They Have Sap, Spirit, Sex. Books Are Panderers. The Jews Are Not Wrong To Worship Books. A Real Book Has Pheromones And Sprouts Grass Through Its Cover.

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.

Blaming Women Is Always In Fashion.

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

Turning Fifty ... Is Like Flying: Hours Of Boredom Punctuated By Moments Of Sheer Terror.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

Exceptional People Are Often Called Crazy By The Ordinary World.

Nothing You Write Is Ever Lost To You. At Some Other Level Your Mind Is Working On It.

Underneath It All, You Longed To Be Annihilated By Love.

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.

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

Human Experience

Venice Is Ever The Fragile Labyrinth At The Edge Of The Sea And It Reminds Us How Brief And Perilous The Journeys Of Our Lives Are; Perhaps That Is Why We Love It So. City Of Plagues And Brief Liaisons, City Of Lingering Deaths And Incendiary Loves, City Of Chimeras, Nightmares, Pigeons, Bells. You Are The Only City In The World Whose Dialect Has A Word For The Shimmer Of Canal Water Reflected On The Ceiling Of A Room.

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.

Never Joke With The Press. Irony Does Not Translate Into Newsprint.

Surviving Means Being Born Over And Over.

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!

Love Is Everything It's Cracked Up To Be

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.

When I Met My Husband, I Refused To Invite Him Home For Passover Because I Was Embarrassed My Mother Might Serve All The Catered Dishes In The Wrong Order.

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

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

There Are No Atheists On Turbulent Airplanes.

I Think I've Become More Cynical About Sex. Meaning, I Don't Think Sex In And Of Itself Leads To An Epiphany.

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

I Have Not Ceased Being Fearful, But I Have Ceased To Let Fear Control Me.

Fear And Courage

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.

The Best Slave Does Not Need To Be Beaten. She Beats Herself.

It's Hard To Do Fiction And Nonfiction Simultaneously.

Fiction And Nonfiction

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

The Absolute Bedrock Of Our Independence Is Having Control Over Our Own Bodies. You Cannot Be Independent If The Government Or Someone Else Says Whether Or Not You Can Use Birth Control. Unless You're In Charge Of Your Body, You're Not In Charge Of Anything. I Think That's Really The Bottom Line Of Feminism.

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

Why Do Analysts Always Answer A Question With A Question?

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.

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.

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.

Conflict Is The Soul Of Literature.

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

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

Compose With Utter Freedom And Edit With Utter Discipline.

You Reach A Point In Life Where You Realize That You Might As Well Do What You Need To Do, Because Your Being Loved Or Not Being Loved Is Really A Function Of The People You Encounter And Not Of Yourself. That Is An Immensely Liberating Insight.

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

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

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

Photographs Are The Most Curious Indicators Of Reality.

I Had Been A Feminist All My Life, But The Big Problem Was How To Make Your Feminism Jibe With You Unappeasable Hunger For Male Bodies.

There Is No Loneliness Like The Loneliness Of A Dead Marriage.

When I Was A Ten-year Old Bookworm And Used To Kiss The Dust Jacket Pictures Of Authors As If They Were Icons, It Used To Amaze Me That These Remote People Could Provoke Me To Love.

Solitude Is Un-american.

The Only Rule I Have When Writing Is To Try To Tell The Truth. That Doesn't Mean You Can't Exaggerate, Edit, Rewrite Things To Make Them More Dramatic. But Emotional Truth Is What I Look For In Writing.

Art Is Not Advocacy And Advocacy Is Not Art.

Having Stopped Expecting Truth, We Rarely Get It.

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

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.

All My Forebears Worked For A Living. My Grandfather Painted Portraits. My Mother Too. My Aunt Painted Seascapes.

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.

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

Beware Of The Man Who Praises Women's Liberation; He Is About To Quit His Job.

At Fifty The Madwoman In The Attic Breaks Loose, Stomps Down The Stairs, And Sets Fire To The House. She Won't Be Imprisoned Anymore.

Love Gives Without Taking

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.

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Cynthia McKinney

James Patterson

John James Audubon

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