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"You don't have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty."
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"And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal.Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of, the great desert tracts in his consciousness."

"Nothing humbles a beautiful woman better than not being wanted by a man whose girlfriend or wife is ugly (or not as beautiful as she is)."

"You can grow up being a troublemaker and then before you know it the next thing you're doing is listening to Frank Zappa whilst chilling out-now that's the intelligent way out. What would a psychiatrist say about that?"

"Indoctrination is not just demeaning to the human conscience, it is lethal for the flourishing psychology of the hungry, young mind."

"Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it."

"We doubt in others, what is in fact in ourselves. The skeletons in your own closet are the things that scare you the most about others; people who come from a background of lying are suspicious of lying in others and so on and so forth. The most trusting of people, are not people who have never been betrayed or who have never felt pain; but the most trusting of people are those who in themselves do not find those things worthy of that blame. We see the world through the eyes of the condition of our own souls."

"How can I put this? There's a king of gap between what I think is real and what's really real. I get this feeling like some kind of little something-or-other is there, somewhere inside me... like a burglar is in the house, hiding in a wardrobe... and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic I've established for myself. The way a magnet can make a machine go crazy."

"One lunatic in Rampton used to have bouts of hysteria. Where he would let out a scream, and run at a wall and dive headfirst - crash! He was given a crash helmet! (Well it is a mad house.)"

"We attract what we are. We attract who we are."
Explore more quotes by Erica Jong

"I went for years not finishing anything. Because of course when you finish something you can be judged.... I had poems which were rewritten so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out."

"You're afraid of criticism,' she says. 'But criticism is a sign of life! You know who doesn't get criticized? Nonentities! Only the dead escape criticism."

"Fame turns out to be a powerful instrument of grace because it humbles its chosen victims in a hurry. You sail into it, your canvas swelled with grandiosity, and when your fifteen minutes are over and you are becalmed, you realize that grandiosity cannot take you where you need to go.Only then do you learn to row like hell, asking God for the strength to stay afloat."

"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?"

"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."

"Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married."

"In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving - instead of actually getting up and leaving."
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