Erica Jong

(26 March 1942 / New York City)

poet Erica Jong
#275 on top 500 poets

Erica Jong Quotes

  • ''Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. "Hello to Hollywood ...," epigraph, How To Save Your Own Life (1977).
    13 person liked.
    		10 person did not like.
  • ''Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. How To Save Your Own Life, epigraph to "Bennett tells all in Woodstock ... ," (1977).
    15 person liked.
    		6 person did not like.
  • ''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.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. How To Save Your Own Life, epigraph to "My posthumous life ...," (1977).
    15 person liked.
    		6 person did not like.
  • ''Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. "Take the Red-Eye....," Epigraph, How To Save Your Own Life (1977).
    8 person liked.
    		1 person did not like.
  • ''Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. "The Artist as Housewife," The First Ms. Reader, ed. Francine Kragbrun (1972).
    10 person liked.
    		1 person did not like.
  • ''Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. "The Artist as Housewife," The First Ms Reader, ed. Francine Kragbrun (1972).
    2 person liked.
    		0 person did not like.
  • ''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.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. "The Artist as Housewife," The First Ms. Reader, ed. Francine Kragbrun (1972).
    3 person liked.
    		0 person did not like.
  • ''Men and women, women and men. It will never work.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. The narrator (Isadora Wing), in Fear of Flying, ch. 16 (1973).
    8 person liked.
    		0 person did not like.
  • ''Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. The narrator (Isadora Wing), in Fear of Flying, ch. 6 (1973).
    3 person liked.
    		0 person did not like.
  • ''Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.''
    Erica Jong (b. 1942), U.S. author. The narrator (Isadora Wing), in Fear of Flying, ch. 6 (1973).
    3 person liked.
    		0 person did not like.

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Best Poem of Erica Jong

Beast, Book, Body

I was sick of being a woman,
sick of the pain,
the irrelevant detail of sex,
my own concavity
uselessly hungering
and emptier whenever it was filled,
and filled finally
by its own emptiness,
seeking the garden of solitude
instead of men.

The white bed
in the green garden--
I looked forward
to sleeping alone
the way some long
for a lover.

Even when you arrived,
I tried to beat you
away with my sadness,
my cynical seductions,
and my trick of
turning a slave
into a master.

And all because
you made
my fingertips...

Read the full of Beast, Book, Body

We Learned

The decorum of fire...
-- Pablo Neruda

We learned the decorum of fire,
the flame's curious symmetry,
the blue heat at the center of the thighs,
the flickering red of the hips,
& the tallow gold of the breasts
lit from within

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