top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I had forgotten how awful it was to be a woman alone--the leering glances, the catcalls, the offers of help which you dared not accept for fear of incurring a sexual debt. The awful sense of vulnerability. No wonder I had gone from man to man and always wound up married. How could I have left Bennett? How could I have forgotten?"
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Sensitivity quotes
"In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love."
"It seems my heart is made of tissue paper, I wish the world would handle it more delicately."
"I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block."
"I'm not sure. But there's something about the darkness, the stillness of this hour, I think, that creates a language of its own. There's a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability we allow ourselves at exactly the wrong moment, tricked by the darkness into thinking it will keep our secrets. We forget that the blackness is not a blanket; we forget that the sun will soon rise. But in the moment, at least, we feel brave enough to say things we'd never say in the light."
"I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories."
"Turns out rolling your eyes in a bar when 'Land Down Under' plays is like someone belching during the Star Spangled Banner in America."
"Despite the way she rallied, the haunted look in her eyes was enough to break him, as lost and lonely as an abandoned child's."
"What was worse, he couldn't tell her how much he thought he maybe might kinda sorta love her."
"I fear I have praised you too much too soon. Will I lose you in your shame of believing that you can never be what I think you are?"
"I embrace my sensitivity and let it enhance my joy every day."
Explore more quotes by Erica Jong
"All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. 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."
"Most people in this country are looking for literature that is useful. They feel that just exploring their feelings is good enough - they should be reading about leveraged buy-outs or how to get thin. We live in a culture that is so absolutely, madly focused on commercialism and on creating money and completely turned away from any other kind of creative value. People don't generally turn to poetry unless they're bereaved or have fallen in love. Or in adolescence, when their feelings are very strong and turbulent. I think most of us are dying for lack of spirit in this culture."
"I don't believe what you believe," I yelled, "and I don't respect your beliefs and I don't respect you for holding them. If you can honestly make a statement like that about the power behind the throne, how can you possibly understand anything about me or the things I'm struggling with? I don't want to live by the things you live by, I don't want that kind of life and I don't see why I should be judged by its standards."
"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."
"Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world."
bottom of page