Erica Jong Quotes

I don't like sleeping with people I really love. I don't want to sleep with them because sex cannot last, but affection can last forever.

To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.

I need sex for a clear complexion, but I'd rather do it for love.

Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.

Familiarity with your lover is what initially makes sex really good.

Sex is hardly ever just about sex.

How genuine is my capacity for love if there is no one for me to love, to laugh with, to treat tenderly, to be trusted by?

But what doesn't change is that love is something we all crave. Everyone is looking for that touch, that emotion, that feeling. Love makes the mundane matter.

Good sex is a mystery. Perhaps humping and pumping is not a mystery, but good sex is a mystery, and how human beings become truly intimate remains a mystery.

I don't think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.

Sex should be a deepening of communication, not a substitute for it.

Remember, intimacy increases with honesty. Share less to keep people away and more to draw them closer.

Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love.

They haven't made love for years but sleep holding hands

The more you think that you are watching a show about sex, the more you ultimately are watching a show about the challenges of just connecting with human beings and being intimate.

When I'm not in a relationship, I shave one leg. That way, when I sleep, it feels like I'm with a woman.

All intimacy is rare-that's what makes it precious.

As we get deeper, we move closer and closer to other people; we feel closer to life as a whole.

You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.

The art of love is who you share it with.

Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered

People don't need sex so much as they need to be listened to.

No sex is better than bad sex.

It's refreshing, honestly, to be able to have more intellectual conversations about sex and the meaning of sex, and intimacy and what that means in relationships. As a person in the world, it's on your mind. It's a part of your life, after a certain age until you're dead. So, to be able to examine it in a different way is really fulfilling.

Most sex doesn't really bring people together. You have to reach a certain level of connection, I think, and that's pretty rare.