“Sometimes she seemed like a woman without skin. She felt everything so intensely, had so little capacity to filter out pain that everyday events often seemed unbearable to her. Paradoxically it is also that skinlessness which makes a poet. One must have the gift of language, of course, but even a great gift is useless without the other curse: the eyes that see so sharply they often want to close. Her eyes were astoundingly blue and astoundingly sharp. Nothing escaped her. She saw everything, and since most of what there is to see in the world is painful, she often lived in pain. ”

—Erica Jong, Remembering Anne Sexton

“Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.”

—Erica Jong

“Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it… It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk everything, you risk even more.”

—Erica Jong, How To Save Your Own Life

“Anne Sexton sometimes seemed like a woman without skin. She felt everything so intensely, had so little capacity to filter out pain that everyday events often seemed unbearable to her. Paradoxically it is also that skinlessness which makes a poet. One must have the gift of language, but even a great gift is useless without the other curse: the eyes that see so sharply they often want to close.”

—Erica Jong; “Remembering Anne Sexton” (October 27, 1974) (New York Times)

“People who live by the sea understand eternity. They copy the curves of the waves, their hearts beat with the tides, & the saltiness of their blood corresponds with the sea. They know that the house of flesh is only a sandcastle built on the shore, that skin breaks under the waves like sand under the soles of the first walker on the beach when the tide recedes. Each of us walks there once, watching the bubbles rise up through the sand like ascending souls, tracing the line of the foam, drawing our index fingers along the horizon pointing home.”

—Erica Jong, “People Who Live” 

“Unfillable -- that's what I was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart.”

—erica jong, fear of flying

“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.”

—Erica Jong

“Pero ya que soy mujer, debo no sólo inspirar el poema sino también escribirlo a máquina, no sólo concebir al niño sino también darlo a luz, no sólo da a luz al niño sino también bañarlo, no sólo bañar al niño sino también alimentarlo no sólo alimentar al niño sino también llevarlo a todas partes, a todas partes... mientras que los hombres escriben poemas sobre los misterios de la maternidad.”

—Fragmento de Envidia del pene, Erica Jong

“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. ”

—Erica Jong

“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 ”

—Erica Jong

“Envidio a los hombres que puede anhelar con infinita vaciedad el cuerpo de una mujer.”

—Fragmento de Envidia del pene, Erica Jong

“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.”

—Erica Jong
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