My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.
Erica JongRead
In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Poetry serves as a medium to convey deep and often difficult emotions, such as love and loss.
This quote highlights the unique power of poetry in capturing and articulating the complex emotions that can be challenging to express in everyday language. Whether it’s the sorrow of losing a loved one or the joy of falling in love, poetry provides a form of solace and understanding that resonates with people during profound moments in their lives.
Themes
PoetryEmotionLoveLossExpression
In practice
Example use cases
During a memorial service, someone could quote this to capture the essence of the grief felt by the attendees.
More from Erica Jong
All quotes →I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.
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No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.
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My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.
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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 JongRead
I believe that women should live for love, for motherhood and for intellect, and I believe we shouldn't have to choose. And I believe that's always been difficult for women, to express themselves intellectually, maternally, and passionately.
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Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
Wallace StevensRead
Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.
Charles BaudelaireRead
Each song has its own secret that's different from another song, and each has its own life. Sometimes it has to be teased out, whereas other times it might come fast. There are no laws about songwriting or producing. It depends on what you're doing, not just who you're doing.
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I work with few colors, what creates the illusion of quantity is that they fell in the right place.
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Sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.
Itzhak PerlmanRead
An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
Thomas MannRead