Erica Jong Quotes

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.

Yes, once—many, many years ago. I thought I had made a wrong decision. Of course, it turned out that I ha been right all along. But I was wrong to have thought I was wrong.

I do think I'm terrific at giving advice. Although in our hearts we usually know what we should do. It's rare that you get in a situation in life where you don't know how to proceed. You know the thing you should do, but don't want to.

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

Human weakness is to desire to know what one does not want to know.

I'd rather believe in my own choice and see it all go wrong than do something I'm not fully convinced of and later feel guilty about it.

Somewhere deep down there's a decent man in me, he just can't be found.

In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.

You have within you many strong and cruel enemies to overcome. You must know that there are still a thousand ties which you must break. No one can tell you what they are; only you can tell by looking at yourself and into your heart.

Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.

One learns in life to keep silent and draw one's own confusions.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.

The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her.

A man's conflicts represent what he 'really' is.

Everyone has the answers.

I ask you to accept one thing. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That's your call

We must not be shocked into impotence because we are afraid of the difficulty of the alternatives facing us.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself

The mistakes you made you tend to conveniently forget

If there were a being in the world whose eyes could look into other people's hearts, very few men or women would be able to face up to it.

Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to doI don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself—as I did every damn time—the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, I’m learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I’ve still got work to do.

I've never seen any life transformation that didn't begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.

In life we often look to others for simple, but difficult answers, despite the fact that we have those answers ourselves.

It is bad for the soul to know itself a coward, it is apt to take refuge in mere wordy violence.